Jarrett Walker, Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking about Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives (2024)

A veteran public-transit consultant explains everything you really need to know about designing urban bus and train networks

In 2017, Elon Musk called consulting public-transit planner Jarrett Walker an idiot. This happened on the the social-media platform formerly known as Twitter, before Musk himself took its helm. It began with a criticism of public transit Musk lodged while promoting the notional Hyperloop: "Why do you want to get on something with a lot of other people, that doesn’t leave where you want it to leave, doesn’t start where you want it to start, doesn’t end where you want it to end? And it doesn’t go all the time. That’s why everyone doesn’t like it. And there’s like a bunch of random strangers, one of who might be a serial killer." Walker tweeted that Musk's "hatred of sharing space with strangers is a luxury (or pathology) that only the rich can afford. Letting him design cities is the essence of elite projection," which in turn drew Musk's blunt riposte.

This was a dispiriting exchange, not least for what it underscored about the conduct of today's elites. (No matter how deep I get into the twenty-first century, I'll never let go of my expectation that the wealthiest members of society should also be the most refined.) But like Donald Trump, Musk's impulsive baseness and aura of deep eccentricity belies his ability to express the psyche of the American everyman. Real or perceived, the inconvenience and danger of public transit is — to use Musk's odd phrasing — why everyone doesn't like it. Even if that American everyman goes to certain cities in Europe or Asia and sees, let alone rides, bus and urban rail systems that are cleaner, safer, and more efficient than he'd ever thought possible, he'll still believe that they couldn't possibly work back home. And for all I know, he may be right.

When I interviewed Walker in 2012, I brought up the perception that Asian cities have excellent public transit, Europe has good public transit, and American cities have bad public transit. He responded that I had, in essence, described a scale of density, with Asian cities being the densest and American cities the least dense. This gave me pause, although I already understood density is what makes convenient public transit viable, in part because I'd already read Walker's book, Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking about Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives. Its first edition came out in 2011, when I was starting seriously to read books about cities — and, not coincidentally, when I moved to Los Angeles, a city famous for its supposed lack of public transit and consequent dependence on the private automobile.

I say "supposed" because Los Angeles even then had an extensive public-transit system consisting of both under- and above-ground rail as well as a bewildering variety of bus lines. Before moving there, I assumed I'd have to buy a car sooner or later, but in four years I never did get around to it. Part of that had to do with my being a freelancer without a commute; another, larger part of it had to do with my living in Koreatown, one of the city's most residentially and commercially dense neighborhoods. Not that I could easily go everywhere included in the (preposterously over-broad, it must be said) popular conception of Los Angeles; many so-called Angelenos who complain that the subway "doesn't go anywhere" mean that it doesn't go straight from the exurb on one end of the country where they live to the exurb on the other end where they work.

Whatever difficulties it presented at the time, Los Angeles struck me as having the potential to become — at least by American standards — a great public-transit city. I was thus heartened to read that Walker, who'd been professionally consulting for public-transit agencies since the early nineteen-nineties, seemed to feel similarly optimistic. "Car-oriented cities are full of wide, fast boulevards, usually six to eight lanes but sometimes even wider," he writes in Human Transit. "Where they intersect, there is often commercial development on all four corners. Even in the car era, apartments have often been built close to these intersections. So while the pedestrian environment is often dreadful, the development pattern — a mixture of commercial and dense residential — is actually quite good for transit." And what goes for the American boulevard in general goes more so for the Los Angeles boulevard in particular.

"In 2050, the aggressive rapid transit program approved by voters in 2008 is mostly done," Walker imagines toward the end of the book. Rail both light and heavy "links all of the dense urban centers of the region. Dense communities are growing around these new stations, attracted by the spectacular access to opportunity available there, and some new high-rise centers have developed." The Los Angeles boulevard "feels more like a Parisian boulevard in many ways, including generous sidewalks, shade trees, and of course, a transit lane." The bus is "a long, snakelike vehicle lined with many doors, so that people can flow on and off as easily as they do on a subway. Sophisticated signal systems ensure that nothing can get in its way, so it glides smoothly from one stop to the next past all the frustrations of other traffic." And "because it works, all kinds of people ride it."

Whether this vision of the boulevard civilized (to use Walker's term) is on track to realization I couldn't say, having not set foot in Los Angeles for some years. But that passage has stuck in my mind ever since I first read it, and I was pleased to see it (and its accompanying illustration) retained in the revised edition of Human Transit, published just this year. Walker has cut some sections and added others, but on the whole, the book remains what I remember it having been in its first edition: the most understandable primer I know of on not just how public transit works, but on what public transit is. If you live in one of the denser world cities, such a explanatory work may seem surplus to requirements, but in most of the United States, you've really got to start from square one.

Walker has learned this the hard way, as evidenced by both the placidly diplomatic language in which he writes and the iceberg of Sisyphean professional experience sensible beneath its surface. The core of the problem, especially in small-town transit agencies, is that the people in charge tend not to use their own product. Debates about transit suffer, Walker writes, because "our leading decision makers are especially likely to be motorists. No matter how much you support transit, driving a car every day can shape your thinking in powerful, subconscious ways." Over time, he's developed rhetorical techniques to deflect this mindset: for example, "when explaining the concept of frequency to someone who lives in a suburban house and gets around only by car, I’ll say, 'Imagine there’s a gate at the end of your driveway that opens only once an hour.'"

The best illustration I know of the kind of public-transit schemes invented by people who only ever drive comes from Cameron Crowe's film Singles. One of its titular ensemble of Seattle twenty- and thirty-somethings is a junior transit planner who dreams of building what he calls the "Supertrain" (which may or may not be a Gen-X reference to the short-lived seventies NBC show). Though the movie never gets into detail about his plans, the Supertrain seems to be some kind of luxury commuter rail line. "You give them great coffee, great music, they will park and ride," the character insists of its prospective riders. Though this doesn't sound like an especially ambitious rapid-transit system, it's portrayed as a hopelessly idealistic pipe dream. Eventually, the mayor (Tom Skerritt, bringing his usual gravitas) shoots it down with one line: "People love their cars."

This in Seattle, which in the early nineties — the age of Frasier, Sleepless in Seattle, the rising Starbucks, and so on — was being held up as a mecca of American urbanity. (32 years later, I note, the city boats a single light-rail line, which does at least connect downtown to the airport.) The Supertrain would always have been a non-starter, but one needs only read Human Transit to understand why fanciful amenities — "great coffee, great music" — are meaningless in the absence of such core transit-network necessities as ease of connection, a legible grid-like shape, and above all, frequency. "For a motorist, roads are there all the time, so their speed is the most important fact that distinguishes them," Walker writes, emphasizing the importance of indicating frequency clearly on maps. "But transit is there only if it’s coming soon."

For the better part of the past decade, I've lived in Seoul, well into the the Asian end of the density scale. Here, not only is transit almost always coming soon, you can rely on a display at the stop or station to tell you exactly how soon. When I visited Los Angeles a few years ago, having to wait fifteen minutes for a train or bus felt like a human-rights violation — to say nothing of the times I had no indication of when or even whether that train or bus would show up. One wishes American cities would simply adopt east Asian methods of transit-building wholesale. In reality, of course, there's nothing simple about it, for transit systems don't exist in isolation from the cities they serve, on whose shape and distribution of population and activity — their geometry, as Walker puts it — those systems’ effectiveness depends.

There's also the matter of cultural difference. While I was reading this new edition of Human Transit, one fellow American I follow on none-dare-stop-calling-it-Twitter happened to argue, not without a note of regret, that "we do not have the social norms or political institutions required to create efficient, safe transit that isn't full of disordered people." He went on to identify two major problems. First, "too many hands are in the pie, so the routes and schedules get pulled in too many directions (and nobody wants to make the tradeoffs necessary to generate efficient routes that *by necessity* leave some constituents out)," a phenomenon Walker discusses in detail. Second, "there is basically *no* political will to do what it takes to make sure you don't have to endure something scary every 100 or so rides," which for many is more off-putting than the carnage of the freeway.

Hence Elon Musk's remark about having to ride with "a bunch of random strangers," which Walker makes a valiant effort to spin in a more positive direction. "At its most successful, a transit system's ridership is as diverse as the city or community it serves," he writes. "It's full of all kinds of people making all kinds of trips, all being a bunch of random strangers to each other." In practice, however, this tends to resonate with an increasingly deep-seated political anxiety in the United States: many ordinary Americans feel they have no say — indeed, feel shamed for daring to want a say — in who is and is not admitted into the society around them. They fear that someone on the bus "might be a serial killer" because they assume their society no longer has the will, or indeed the ability, to weed its serial killers out.

It would be an exaggeration to say that Americans avoid public transit so as not to encounter murderers. But it wouldn't be so much of an exaggeration to say that they avoid public transit so as not to encounter an underclass inclined toward impulsive, anti-social behavior. A few months ago, I published an essay collection in Korean, which includes piece about the qualities of Seoul that give me reservations about living anywhere else. In the many interviews I've given about the book since then, one question has arisen with conspicuous frequency: "You mention that you like that the bus windows aren't all scratched up in Seoul, but why are they scratched up in America?" The first time I heard it, I struggled to come up with a plausible-sounding answer. Why are the bus windows all scratched up in America?

I've come around to answering that question by pointing out that the great majority of public-transit riders in Seoul appear to belong to the middle class, which assures that the facilities will be at least reasonably maintained. (That's also true of "the facilities," euphemistically speaking: all Seoul subway stations have bathrooms, and ones you'd use willingly, another quality that strikes visiting Americans as practically science-fictional.) Not so in most US cities, where public transit systems function as a kind of bare-bones safety net for what Lisa Simpson once described as "the poor and very poor alike." They thus exist in a condition of not just under-investment but practical invisibility. Not long ago I told a Korean-American woman in her thirties about the scratched-up bus window question, and she said she couldn't remember ever having ridden a bus in the United States.

"Una ciudad avanzada no es en la que los pobres pueden moverse en carro, sino una en la que incluso los ricos utilizan el transporte público." That was said in 2012 by Enrique Peñalosa, former mayor of Bogotá (at whose bus rapid transit system American mayors marvel before declaring it unsuitable for their own constituents), and has since been a quotable quote among transit fans. I leave it in Spanish because I happen to know that Walker is not just an enthusiast of Hispanophone culture, but a man of culture more broadly; he mentions having been made "extremely sensitive to the workings of language" by doing a literature PhD. Though impeccably written, Human Transit is clearly aimed at a not just non-technical but also non-readerly audience; I'd like to see Walker write more on this same subject while bringing his "whole self" to it, as corporate America used to say.

Walker lives in Portland, which by American standards is a better-than-decent transit city. So does another, less-known writer whose work closely suits my own interests: Nick Nielsen, who's been blogging for many years (and now publishes a newsletter) about civilization itself and all subjects relevant to it. "Would that American cities had transportation networks comparable to these 'backward' nations of Central and Eastern Europe," he once wrote, remembering his experiences in Prague and Budapest in the nineties. "And we will, in time. The US is still a young nation, and our cities are relatively recent." In Europe, as in Asia, "social conventions of mass transit — and the structure of individual lives that depend upon and presume the availability of mass transit — are established, mature institutions. In the US, such matters are still contested."

Another advantage of mass-transit society is that "transportation is professionalized: the drivers are experienced professionals, and there is an existing infrastructure for regular repair and maintenance. It is frankly a danger to have the inexperienced, the incautious, the over-cautious, and the foolhardy out on the roads under adverse weather conditions" — or, increasingly, under ideal weather conditions, given the ongoing "de-skilling" of the public in not just motoring but all areas of technical competence. That this idea is easy to understand has, of course, scant effect on the likelihood of its acceptance, just as explaining the mechanics of transportation network design hardly guarantees their effective long-term implementation. Like women's fashion, public transit and the construction of the urban environment in which it operates are, in most respects, problems civilization has solved — the trouble being how many of us have an incentive to pretend that they aren't.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His current projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, or on Facebook.