One of the many parking lots wrapping around Downtown Syracuse

Downtown Is Still Built For Cars and Minor Ways to Begin Shifting the Balance of Power

March 18, 2021

Downtown Syracuse, like so many other downtowns across the country, is considered one of the most walkable places in the community. Wide sidewalks, frequent crossings, stores, restaurants and bars, and varied architecture throughout help make it an inviting place to walk around and enjoy the day. Even with so many of these factors favoring walkability, it is impossible to ignore that cars remain dominant within the neighborhood.

First, let’s begin with the obvious - Downtown Syracuse is an island surrounded by parking. Chapter 5 of the Preliminary Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the I-81 construction project showcased the map below which identifies all of the parking structures in and around Downtown Syracuse.

Parking infrastructure map from the I-81 PDEIS

Looking at this map it quickly becomes apparent that the vast majority of space in the Downtown area is devoted to the storage of vehicles. Some will argue that this parking is needed for all of the workers, residents, and visitors that the area attracts, yet we don’t seem to have the same interest in providing this sort of access for people traveling on bike or on foot. In fact, if you look at the most recent Bike Suitability Map from SMTC you’ll notice that there are very few ways to enter Downtown safely on a bike. Crossing under highways and railroad bridges, competing with off ramps where drivers maintain their highway speeds, it is often dangerous getting into this central area. Just recently a cyclist was hit near a highway on-ramp and was sent to the hospital in critical condition.

Screenshot of the Interactive Bike Suitability Map from SMTC

There has been movement to improve access to Downtown Syracuse on bike, with the Empire State Trail and the Creek Walk both improving navigation and safety for riders and pedestrians, but there is room for improvement. Some of the infrastructure that has been built is extremely high quality, including a protected bike lane on the service road of West Street and in one direction on Water Street (although winter upkeep still needs improvement), while others leave plenty to be desired. Sharrows through Clinton Square lead to a path that’s blocked off for nearly half of the year due to the ice skating rink, while a bike path just west of the square is up on the sidewalk, forcing pedestrians and cyclists to share in already limited space. The roadway west of Clinton Square could’ve removed some parking spaces creating enough room for a protected bike path in both directions.

Improving upkeep in the winter and adding additional painted lanes around known yearly obstructions would help increase the usefulness of this trail, both to visitors and, more importantly, residents. Still, these lanes are major improvements and begin to give back some space to non-car uses.

Protected Bike Lane on Water Street

Snowed In Protected Bike Lane

Blocked Bike Lane in Clinton Square

Sidewalk Bike Lane

While bike infrastructure is slowly improving, pedestrian infrastructure should not be overlooked. Downtown Syracuse has wide sidewalks that make it enjoyable to walk around with friends, with people rarely having to walk in a line behind one another as you go. Even then, there are still signs that pedestrians aren’t in control of this space.

At times sidewalks must be blocked off for various purposes, due to damage or construction, with barriers put up to prevent people from using them. Often these occur in the middle of a block, far from an intersection. Some people will cross the street quickly, or just walk in the street for a bit, which puts their well being at risk. On the other hand, disabled individuals are not provided a way to make either of those decisions. In other cities orange barriers are often rolled out to carve out a pedestrian path, allowing pedestrians to stay on the same side of the road safely, while also building temporary ramps to assist those with disabilities. Simply requiring construction crews or building owners to provide this path can help keep pedestrians safer by preventing darting across the street.

But let’s get back to parking for a moment. While parking lots dominate the downtown area, and will be discussed in more depth in a later post, parking garages serve up their own issues for pedestrians. Garages by nature utilize very compact designs, attempting to squeeze ramps and entrances in where they can while providing the most parking as possible. Due to some of these designs, sight lines when entering and exiting a garage can be reduced significantly. Some garages work to slow drivers down before they exit by placing their automatic arms closer to the opening, ensuring that the vehicles stop and have time to see. Others have no such barrier near their exits, allowing cars to quickly rush out. While most garages make use of fish-eyed mirrors to help with bad sight lines, they are only useful if the driver is moving slow enough to take in what they are showing.

One particularly bad garage is located on Warren Street (above). The garage makes use of a singular ramp for both entering and exiting, with a green light near the exit to warn incoming vehicles. As Warren Street is a one-way street, the light only faces in one direction, making it essentially useless for pedestrians coming in the other direction. The ramp’s tight fit makes it difficult to see into, and makes use of no devices to slow drivers down as they exit. Due to this, driver’s rarely have time to see whether a pedestrian is coming or not, and the pedestrian has little time to see the car approaching.

One approach that should be taken whenever a car is meant to enter a pedestrian space, such as a sidewalk, is the raise it up. Too often we make use of curb cuts, lowering the sidewalk down to meet the roadway, instead of forcing cars to come up into the pedestrian space. By forcing cars to make that movement, their speed decreases and alerts them to the fact that this is not a space meant for them. The YouTube Channel Not just Bikes has produced an excellent video on this topic (below).

Now there is much more we can do to change this dynamic. Throughout the spring I will be writing about more dramatic ideas of how to change our use of streets in Downtown Syracuse. To create change we need to stop considering how our streets and sidewalks are currently used, but instead think of what we would like to see. The minor changes discussed in this post are to help improve things immediately, along with some of my other pet peeves, but we should also think more radically about what the future should be.

Centro bus running through Downtown Syracuse in December 2020

The Key to Freedom Doesn't Have Four Wheels

January 3, 2021

Most Americans have grown up in a society where the car is the ultimate symbol of freedom. Films, television shows, and commercials showing characters hitting the open road, rarely running into traffic, and, somehow, always finding a parking spot right in front of their destination. At the same time characters who ride a bike or the bus are often people without options or at rough points in their lives.The story we’re told over and over again is that the only way to have freedom and comfort in our lives is to own our car.

This is one of the greatest lies we have all been told and that most of us buy into. But is car ownership really freedom?

First let’s think about the financial burden of vehicle ownership. AAA estimates that the average annual cost of owning a vehicle is around $9,300, which is ~$773 per month. Of course this differs based on what type of car you buy, from small sedans costing around $,7100 per year and pick-up trucks costing $10,800 per year. For comparison, the median rent in Syracuse, NY for a two-bedroom apartment, as of January 2, 2021, is $968 per month. For most people, owning a car is close to taking on a second rent. For a community with a median income of just over $36,000, over 58% of that income, before taxes, will go toward those two expenses alone, limiting their financial flexibility.

By contrast, let’s consider the costs of cycling and using public transit. Elly Blue in her book Bikenomics states that cyclists spend only $700 per year on transportation, less than the average monthly cost of car ownership. Bike share programs are even more affordable for users. Syracuse’s Sync bikes, which will hopefully return in the spring, had an annual fee of $50, while Citi Bike in New York would run you $180 at full price. If we look at public transit, purchasing a weekly unlimited ride pass in Syracuse, NY costs $20, resulting in an annual cost of $1,040. If you’re in a larger city, like New York, again using the 7-day unlimited pass (which is the most popular pass in the MTA system), it would cost $1,716 per year. But these cost savings only go so far if the bike and transit networks are poor.

Right now, our built environment is skewed heavily towards cars, subsidizing their use and making it difficult for any other form of transportation to function properly. Even with this bias, car ownership does not equal freedom. If your car breaks down, or is in the shop for any period of time, your access to the city is greatly diminished. You either must rely on rides from others, stay home, or have an additional vehicle (and cost associated with it) at the ready. If you live in a dense neighborhood that relies on street parking, or like to frequent the more vibrant urban areas filled with bars and restaurants, you must build your life around finding parking. I’ve personally found myself refusing to leave my neighborhood after 6pm to avoid losing a coveted parking spot. To me that does not signal any form of freedom, but instead anchors me in place.

While car dependency is not freedom, the current state of transit and bike infrastructure in most of our cities also restricts us. Buses that run once or twice an hour and severely limited bike networks keep many from switching away from car ownership. But this is where we need to focus and where our investments can have the greatest impact.

As I’ve discussed before, frequent bus service, and train service where available, is vital. Knowing a bus arrives every 10-15 minutes allows a rider to show up without needing to check a schedule, with the knowledge that a bus will arrive soon. On major thoroughfares the standard should be even shorter, perhaps 5-10 minutes. Along with this increased service, cities should feel empowered to rethink their transit maps. Many haven’t been updated in decades and no longer reflect where people live or the destinations they frequent.

Onondaga Count bike network backboneSource: InTheSalt.City — Onondaga Count bike network backbone
Source: InTheSalt.City

Beyond public transit, we should be expanding bike infrastructure across our cities to form true networks. Syracuse and Onondaga County are finally starting to see the backbone of a network appear, aided by the Creekwalk, Loop the Lake trail, and the Empire State Trail. Together these trails help cyclists, and pedestrians, reach many of the major destinations in our region, but still lack connections into neighborhoods. In order to truly improve access there needs to be a network of safe routes that connect up to this backbone. Sharrows will not cut it. Even standard bike lanes often aren’t enough. In order to really encourage bike usage protected lanes are needed. Lanes where parents feel safe letting their kids ride on their own will help shift our mentality away from needing “protective metal boxes” to ship kids around.

While bike ownership requires a much lower investment than vehicle ownership, it often does not allow for complete freedom of movement. Many people feel comfortable riding bikes in nice weather but often try to avoid riding in the rain or snow. With a robust bike share program, someone can choose to ride to their destination while it's nice out and find an alternative way home should the weather change. Grouped together with a frequent and useful bus network, riders can make choices on the fly depending on what works best for them at that moment without worrying about needing to leave their bike anywhere (although Centro buses do have bike racks to accommodate cyclists).

Two riders on Sync bikes on West Street in Downtown Syracuse

One additional piece that should be explored more vigorously by cities is the expansion of car share programs. While almost all day-to-day activities can be accomplished without a car, it’s hard to say they don’t come in handy from time-to-time. A car share program would allow for many residents to free themselves from their car ownership while providing them access to one on the occasions where they’re needed. A 2014 parking permit plan in Burlington, VT states that for every car in their car share program, 16 personal vehicles are taken off the road. With a widespread program this could help eliminate hundreds, if not thousands, of cars and free up space for additional transit and bike infrastructure.

When taken all together, a successful network of both public transit and alternative transit options would free people to move about their cities without needing to plan ahead, increasing spontaneity. This isn’t out of reach for cities. With a new presidential administration coming in that seems to understand the importance of transit, expansive programs could be in the works. And it wouldn’t even cost that much.

So, maybe it’s time that we rethink what freedom means to us and invest in projects that truly improve the lives of everyone.

To Fight the Climate Crisis We Need: To Start Right Now

August 25, 2020

For the summer of 2020 I will be releasing a series of articles reflecting on some of the things cities, and urban planners specifically, can be advocating and planning for to help in our fight against the climate crisis. These pieces will reflect on our transportation networks, the need for urban living, and protecting our natural resources while bringing them into the city. While these are not comprehensive of everything that needs to be done to turn the tide of this crisis, they will provide a different vision of what our world could be like if we commit to a different form of development.

At times the climate crisis feels too large to tackle with too many pieces that need to be addressed all at once. Many will point to the role of multinational corporations and their outsized impact on the environment, noting that 100 companies have been found to be responsible for 71% of emissions since 1988. They believe that these corporations should be forced to change while changing very little about their own behavior. Yes, those corporations need to be forced to change, but since the biggest culprits are gas giants like Exon and BP, our behavior impacts their decision making. I’ve spent this summer going through big picture ideas of how we can reshape our cities to help fight this crisis, but for the last piece in this series I want to focus on a few specific things we can do right now that will get us on our way.

Syracuse Bike Plan

Rochester Bike Master Plan

Portland Bike Plan 2030

Hunter College Bike Plan for QCD11

Implement Your City’s Bike Plan

Every city I have lived in has some form of vision plan for an extensive bike network, yet very few have made significant progress implementing them. The planning has been done, the desired routes have been identified, yet we continue to wait. Some are waiting for funding to add protected bike lanes and streetscape elements along the routes, while others are stifled by backlash from communities worried about parking. But now is the time to jump start those plans.

Protected lane on Northern Boulevard in Queens, New York using a jersey barrier.

Protected lanes can often be done in low cost ways, such as using flex posts or parking blocks. Some places have even opted for jersey barriers which, while not visually appealing, offer high levels of protection for people on bikes. You can also make use of parking protected lanes that only require slightly more paint than a standard lane. Parking protected lanes often come with controversy due to drivers being uncomfortable with the new parking design, but cities shouldn’t be quick to revert back at the first sign of pushback. People can adapt and learn.

We should also remember that most lanes that cities have proposed are just standard lanes, simply requiring paint on the ground. Cities should be looking at their bike network plans every time a street is repaved, putting in their planned lanes as they go along. Even if these lanes are not fully connected initially, they’ll help build out the network faster and encourage their use.

Begin a Bus Network Redesign

Buses remain the backbone of our public transit systems, carrying the vast majority of transit riders in the country. They are also the most versatile transit mode, allowing them to adapt in a short period of time.Yet, as discussed in the earlier piece on public transit, few have significantly changed their networks to reflect the current geography of the communities they serve. This must change in order for these services to meet the needs of their current riders while attracting new riders, which is vital as we look to get more people out of their cars.

While complete redesigns can take several years, the process is much faster and cheaper and can be just as, if not more, effective than building out a rail network. New York, for example, has been working through its redesign process over the last few years, borough by borough, and has begun implementing some of these changes already. Smaller systems should be able to make these changes even faster and should start the groundwork now.

Consider Your Impact When Deciding Where to Live

In the previous piece I dug into the issues with single-family only zoning and our current suburban development patterns. Many of the changes needed to help fix this system will take time, including revamping zoning in municipalities, incentivizing more affordable housing in different forms, and implementing an urban growth boundary, but for those of us who may be moving sometime soon and have the economic ability, consider where you live and its impact on the environment. Whenever possible look for housing close to your work, perhaps along a transit line or bike network. Consider fixing up an older home purchased from your local land bank, or look for rentals (as we begin to decouple home ownership from wealth building, as it is in most of the world). You don’t need a large home for all of those family gatherings you hope to have, no matter what HGTV tries to sell you. Admit to yourself that most of that space will remain empty 98% of the time and find a more functional/efficient way to use a smaller space instead. While the apartment in the video below may be an extreme, we should be looking for ways to use our spaces in different ways to suit our varying needs.

Buy Small, Efficient Vehicles

Although we need to move quickly towards a future without personal vehicles to make the biggest impact on the climate crisis, many of us still live where cars are needed to different extents. If you are one of the millions of Americans in that situation, the next car you get should never be an SUV or pick-up truck (unless you work in construction). As noted in previous pieces, SUVs and trucks are held to much lower emissions and efficiency standards than sedans, making our overwhelming shift to these vehicles even more dangerous. Some will argue they are more efficient than ever before, but that’s a low bar to clear.

Others will argue that they need them due to the harsh winters their cities experience. As someone who has lived in Syracuse, NY for most of my life and has driven through Upstate New York through heavy snow and ice, you don’t. Instead you should consider whether it is vital for you to drive that day, if there is another way for you to get to your destination (perhaps the bus in some cases) if the trip is vital, or spend some extra time shoveling out your vehicle as many of your biggest issues come with simply getting out of your parking space. This also ties in with where you live, as the further out you live the less transportation options you tend to have to reach your destinations, making it far more likely for you to need to drive in bad weather.

Kids sitting in front of an SUV illustrating the size of the blind spot the taller hoods create.Source: ABC 7 WJLA https://wjla.com/features/7-on-your-side/7-on-your-side-children-killed-accidentally-run-over-by-vehicles-with-blind-spots — Kids sitting in front of an SUV illustrating the size of the blind spot the taller hoods create.
Source: ABC 7 WJLA https://wjla.com/features/7-on-your-side/7-on-your-side-children-killed-accidentally-run-over-by-vehicles-with-blind-spots

Still others will argue that they need the bigger vehicle to keep their children safe when driving. While this seems logical, the simple act of you driving that vehicle puts everyone else’s life at risk, including your kids as soon as they are not within the confines of your vehicle. SUVs and trucks have dangerous blind spots, as demonstrated by the image above where every child in front of that car is impossible to see by the driver. SUVs and trucks are also far more likely to kill anyone they strike, regardless of speed, due to the increased height of their hoods. Instead of striking someone at their legs, they hit directly in the chest of most people, if not their heads, causing far more internal damage, often leading to death. If we want people to walk and ride bikes more often, which is needed to truly fight the climate crisis, we need to make sure they are safe while doing so. These increasingly large vehicles put everyone’s life in danger, which has been shown by the sharp increases in pedestrian deaths over the last decade, coinciding with the increased adoption of these vehicles. Part of this is caused by the increased security drivers feel in these vehicles, which results in riskier driving maneuvers and more aggressive driving in general. (Consider picking up a copy of Crash Course by Woodrow Phoenix, which is an excellent illustration of the dangers of our current road networks).

While hybrid vehicles have been shown to have the negative effect of encouraging people to drive more, they are still a better option for most families. For others, opting out of ownership and relying on car share services, such as Via, should be considered, although this is only a true option for those living in cities with a decent level of saturation in this market.

Make Our Covid Open Streets Permanent and Open More

The last immediate recommendation I have is to simply make some of the changes we’ve made to adapt to our new Covid-19 reality permanent. Cities across the country, of all sizes, closed off streets to traffic to open them for people to walk, bike, and dine out to great success. We shouldn’t turn back now, even in winter. Adding heat lamps and coverings can help extend outdoor dining throughout the winter helping restaurants keep their capacities up while avoiding risky indoor dining options.

Open streets in New York have helped small businesses reach new customers and keep them alive while encouraging people to explore their neighborhood businesses more than ever before. Rethinking our streets as places for people instead of cars can help shift our relationships with our neighborhoods, helping us stay local and explore places on foot instead of feeling the need to drive. This only works if we expand these programs so that everyone is within walking distance of an open street network.

Together, each of these actions can have significant impacts on our use of fossil fuels, helping to break the influence of those major corporations that have caused so much damage while improving our quality of life and increasing our sense of community. This isn’t just about saving ourselves and future generations from harm, but also about deciding to invest in a better future, one that is more communal and supportive than the me-centric suburban sprawl we currently endure.

To Fight the Climate Crisis We Need: To Design Cities For People

July 27, 2020

Our current American cities, which are characterized by generally dense populations of people, are not built for those people. As I have mentioned in the previous pieces in this series, over the last century we have given over more and more space to cars while depriving people of needed public spaces. We’ve heard that it was required as our economies grew so that people could move more efficiently through our communities. High speed access to city centers and subsidized car storage once there were needed to ensure the success of our cities, or so the thinking went. Turns out we bled our cities dry of what makes them unique and vital; people. In their place we pumped in toxic exhaust and destroyed our physical and economic health. Activists have tried to wrestle back some of this space for people to walk and ride bikes, pointing to successes in European cities and some American cities who have experienced minor success. Slowly we began to see bike lanes pop up here and there, but no major overhauls or increases in ridership across most of the country.

And then the pandemic hit.

Suddenly many people started to look around and notice that they didn’t have adequate spaces to get out and enjoy the outdoors in their communities. Sidewalks were in disrepair or non-existent. Bike lanes, if there were any, were filled with trash, cracked pavement, or blocked by cars. Even so, bikes sold out across the country, with many stores having months long wait lists for their next shipment. Finally, many of us were on the same page: We need to start designing cities for people. Not only will this shift benefit people on a day-to-day basis, but it will also help us fight the looming climate crisis that threatens the entire world.

Source: NACTO

Source: TNMT

The two charts above demonstrate some of the benefits of giving over more space to people to walk and ride bikes. Walking and biking can transport three to four times more people than mixed traffic can. Not only that, but they can do so without producing significant amounts of carbon (only really seen through the actual manufacturing of bikes).

Before someone brings up the argument that they’ve never seen that many people on bikes in an hour, yet often see cars backed up, let’s think of why there aren’t more people riding. On your average city street you have cars driving over 30mph, rolling through stop signs, taking tight turns with little to no regard for anyone trying to cross the street (even in states like New York where pedestrians have the right-of-way, yet always seem to be running to avoid cars). Now you’re on a bike with cars driving too close to your side, pushing you towards the parked cars where someone flings open their door without looking, causing you to run into it and injure yourself when you luckily don’t get hit by the car driving less than a foot to your left. Without safe bike infrastructure most people will not feel safe using a bike as a way to get around. This doesn’t mean that people aren’t interested in riding bikes more, and in fact there’s been studies across the country that point to over half of respondents wanting to ride more but citing safety as the major reason that they don’t.

Now think about your average trips you make throughout the day; to the gym, to the grocery store, to work, out to eat, etc. While your work commute, depending on where you live, could be a decent distance, perhaps over 10 miles for some, most of those other trips are within 5 miles of your home. A study by the Transportation Research and Education Center shows that 60% of trips are under 5 miles, and close to 40% are under 2 miles. These are distances easily performed on a bike, or even walking. While grocery shopping may seem cumbersome on a bike, there are plenty of bike attachments and designs that are specifically made for moving packages, groceries, and small children.

Or you may think, we live in a place with terrible winters and there’s no way riding a bike in winter makes sense. Well, for some people that may be true, you can look to the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, or even Canada, and find large numbers of people who ride bikes in much worse climates than our own. What it comes down to is priorities and infrastructure. Many European countries that experience harsh winters prioritize clearing snow and ice off of sidewalks and bike lanes before they ever touch vehicle lanes. This is a specific policy that elevates more efficient and environmentally friendly forms of travel over the most harmful forms of travel (private vehicles).

Example of a bike boulevard intersection. Lanes are narrow with a small rotary that fits within a traditional intersection.Source: Small Town and Rural Design Guide — Example of a bike boulevard intersection. Lanes are narrow with a small rotary that fits within a traditional intersection.
Source: Small Town and Rural Design Guide

We don’t need to have bike lanes as beautiful and heavy duty as those seen in Europe and some American cities (even though we can hopefully get more like that soon). In many communities we simply need streets that slow down cars and prioritize access to people riding bikes or walking. Bike boulevards provide opportunities to improve access with minimal interventions, primarily focused around intersections. Bump out islands and small rotaries help prevent cars from taking tight turns or speeding through intersections. As a result, people on bikes and on foot are given improved visibility that allow them to enter intersections in a safer manner with some form of barrier between them and cars. While these interventions are normally put on side streets (as is emphasized in the Rochester Bicycle Master Plan), a network of bike boulevards that connect to commercial corridors could help people who ride get to destinations safely on a parallel street.

Buffered Lane

Protected Lane - Curbs

Sharrows

Protected Lane - Flexposts

Even with a network of bike boulevards, a true network of protected bike lanes is vital. Too often cities paint lines and put in a bike stencil and feel that is enough. Or, even worse, put in sharrows on busy roads. Not only do sharrows not help with safety, they have actually been seen to increase the risk of injury for people on bikes. Paint does not keep a car from hitting you, or from parking in the lane blocking your right-of-way. Parking protected lanes significantly increase the safety for people riding, driving, and walking, but are often controversial due to driver “confusion” and have been taken away after complaints of not understanding how to park. Even putting up flexposts with a buffer provides a level of comfort for riders that painted lines do not, as it’s a more visual cue about the right-of-way. Protected lanes have been shown to see 6x more growth in ridership than unprotected lanes, and they also reduce all forms of crashes, whether car-to-car or car-to-bike, by over 44%.

We’ve seen what works and what brings people out to walk and ride more. We’ve seen cities roll out new bike lanes in a matter of days, shutting down streets to cars and seeing people flock to their newly reclaimed spaces. Yes, for Americans this will be a significant shift in our thinking and how we build out our infrastructure. But if we truly want to tackle the climate crisis, providing more safe spaces for people to ride bikes and walk is one of the most important changes we can implement. Not only will it reduce our carbon emissions, but it will also improve health, improve happiness, and provide opportunities for us to interact with one another face-to-face and make connections that help build community. We can start this change now with minimal investment; just roll out some cones, paint some lanes, and start teaching kids how to ride.

To Fight the Climate Crisis We Need: To Revamp Our Transit Networks and Make Them Free

July 13, 2020

In the previous installment of this series, we looked at electric vehicles and their shortcomings in regards to addressing the climate crisis. We must recognize that breaking our cultural obsession with owning a personal vehicle is the only way to fully tackle the scale of this crisis. Instead, rethinking our public transit networks to work better with the modern form of our cities and making them fare free can help us avert the worst of what is predicted.

Many people will argue that autonomous vehicles will solve many of these issues and convince people to give up ownership, but we can’t wait for that technology to improve to the point where that’s even feasible. As close as we continually hear the technology is, the truth is it’s much further away as designers realize the extreme difficulty of designing a vehicle to operate in such a complex environment. Even if the technology was available and safe, the efficiency of individual cars, even if its a shared fleet, pales in comparison to a properly run public transit system, as laid out in the graphic from NACTO below.

Now imagine if we truly invested in our public transit systems and designed them in a way that fits our modern cities. Many of our transit networks have not been updated in decades, and often continue to follow the same paths streetcars laid out over 100 years ago. As you’d guess, no city is the same as it was 100 years ago; people live in different places, businesses have clustered in different patterns, and the pace of life has changed. Yet, only a small number of cities have taken on the difficult task of revamping their transit networks to reflect how their communities have evolved.

Houston, Texas is usually held up as an example of a city who took on an ambitious bus network redesign that worked, reworking their network into more of a grid with frequent connections and less of a central focus on the downtown core. But mid-size cities have also started to revamp their networks, with an understanding that their central cores are no longer the only employment centers. One local example is Rochester, NY, who’s transit provider, RTS, spent the past few years rethinking how their service will work. They did their best to balance coverage and frequency (which is the central dilemma agencies must consider, and is laid out well in the book Better Buses Better Cities), ramping up frequent service on 10 routes that serve that busiest corridors, while reimagining what service could be in the outer reaches of their service area. With an on-demand service using small vans to connect to fixed route services or, for a slightly higher price, curb-to-curb service within designated zones.

Then you can look to Albany, NY which has looked to develop some of the best bus rapid transit (BRT) lines in the country, showing that a smaller mid-size city can provide service on par with much larger cities. CDTA, Albany’s transit provider, began with the BusPlus Red Line which connects many of the region’s dense neighborhoods and employment centers, seeing ridership climb along the corridor over 20%, to nearly 4 million riders a year. Since then, CDTA has expanded BRT service along two more routes, proving that better bus service can attract riders at a much lower cost than rail service.

METRO Houston Bus Map

RTS Rochester Map

CENTRO Syracuse Map

CDTA Albany BusPlus Map

That’s not to say that rail service isn’t necessary in some cities, including Buffalo, NY which I’ve written about previously, but instead it's an argument in favor of cities exploring new uses for the bus first. Boston’s MBTA has been on the forefront of implementing BRT pilot programs, showing to riders and drivers alike that bus lanes and better service can help everyone. By using traffic cones to change traffic patterns to provide designated bus lanes, MBTA has improved on-time performance and sped up buses along with shortened timelines for public outreach on capital projects by demonstrating the changes being discussed while taking in real-time feedback from riders.

Improving service, primarily frequency (at least a bus every 15 minutes) and speed, will attract new riders and convince some drivers to switch modes, but in order to convince more people to take transit we must make it economically attractive as well. This comes in two ways; stop subsidizing driving and make transit free.

Our current legal and economic structures highly prioritize car usage, which has resulted in the decimation of the urban core in many cities. Parking lots have destroyed once walkable neighborhoods and have pushed residences and businesses further away from one another, resulting in people needing to drive to get to their destinations. Zonings that prioritize single family detached homes, which have a deeply racial history, are some of the main culprits for this new dispersed development pattern. The impact of our housing choices will be covered in a later installment. I also won’t focus on parking too much, but the following video from Vox and this interview with Donald Shoup in City Lab help lay out the many reasons free parking, or even the very low priced on-street parking that does exist, harms our economy and our environment.

Not only does free parking benefit those who drive, workers taking other forms of transportation rarely get free transit passes or other economic benefits for walking, biking or riding transit instead of driving. Drivers also benefit from tax breaks for buying electric cars, even though those cars still cause many of the same issues gas powered cars do. There are no tax incentives towards riding transit, even if it benefits the economy/environment more. If this doesn’t show you how much our governments have prioritized driving over all other transportation methods, consider that speed limits are set by those breaking the law. Other than the maximum (usually 65 or 70) and minimum (30 in most places, unless petitioned otherwise) limits that states set, speed limits are set by the 85th percentile rule, which incentives people to drive faster so that the speed limit gets raised.

Another major issue is the artificially low price of gas, which does not take into account its negative impacts on the environment, and the gas tax. The idea of the gas tax was originally to help cover the maintenance costs of the interstate highway system, but has failed to do so. With better gas mileage and a push towards electric vehicles, the gas tax will become even less of a funding source for maintaining roads, meaning the maintenance will have to come out of the general tax funds, forcing non drivers to pay a larger share of the costs when contributing far less to the wear and tear of the roadways. Charging people by miles traveled will help with this deficit, but should also be coupled with a plan to make transit free and get people out of their cars to begin with.

If you want people to opt into transit use you must make sure it’s frequent and easy to use. Once we change our networks to function more frequently, we then want to make it as easy to use as possible. The best way to do that is to simply make it free. Free transit may reduce costs in the long run with the elimination of fare payment systems, buses spend less time idling as passengers board wasting less energy, and no need for the policing of passengers to detect fare evaders. With most transit agencies already being subsidized to some degree, it wouldn’t cost much to cover the rest. In Central New York, to make CENTRO fare free, at its current service level, it would cost around $50 per household per year in its service counties, about as much as one fill up for a pick up truck. This fee would be much higher in cities with higher farebox recovery rates, such as NYC or Chicago, but advocating for reduced prices and congestion pricing should be able to help.

Our current transportation system will never solve the climate crisis. Unless we’re willing to make bold changes to how transit works and what transportation methods we subsidize we won’t make a meaningful difference in our fight.

4 Train at 161st Street-Yankee Stadium station in the Bronx