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

Imagine a boulevard for a moment in which generous walkways and shade-tolerant evergreen trees, along with a long snakelike vehicle lined with many doors, entice you to take public transit. The moment you doubt whether you can have such a physical design for the mass transit, you cease for ever to be able to do it. Jarrett Walker believes that a pedestrian accelerator transit is feasible. In Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking about Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives, he attempts to let audiences see that having a public transit-oriented city is not a dream. He not only has more than 20 years’ experience as a public transit planning consultant, but he also has a fluent and eloquent writing style given his literature background. He does know the words and is well informed how to put them together. His writing style, in most cases, avoids transportation planning jargon to create a comprehensible article. Where is essential to provide technical terms, on the other hand, he employs the words masterly to the extent that the tremendous caution he takes with words and their meaning is palpable.

So the word route lowers expectations for the frequency and reliability of a service. The word line raises those expectations. My broad intention in this book is to raise expectations of transit rather than lower them, so I will generally use line. However, when I speak specifically of a service that doesn’t run very frequently, I’ll use route.

(45)

Human Transit is targeted to enlighten transit planners about the seven explicit demands of transit users, namely: (1) It takes me where I want to go; (2) It takes me when I want to go; (3) It is a good use of my time; (4) It is a good use of my money; (5) It respects me in the level of safety, comfort, and amenity it provides; (6) I can trust it; and (7) It gives me freedom to change my plans, along with two implicit demands that are side issues and side effects. In order to meet the mentioned demands, Walker professes that client agencies have to be able to make a decision between peak or all-day service, ridership or coverage, connections or complexity, and exclusive rights-of-way or mixed traffic. Therefore, during the informative stories of the book he puts himself in a “plumber’s” shoes to inform you methods of solving the problem, while leaving the choice up to you. However, the more befitting term for him is “crafty plumber.” Although he claims that the pros and cons of each solution are impartially presented, in some cases, he endeavors to artfully persuade the reader into selecting his preferred option.

When I’m designing a network, I don’t try to avoid connections, but I will use a range of tricks to minimize them. And if a transit agency decides that it prefers to be infrequent and complex so that it can avoid connections, I help them design the best possible network that reflects those choices. . . . If you want to avoid connections, then embrace complexity and accept the problems it raises, including low frequency, short span, and barriers to new riders. If you want to escape complexity and build frequency and span, you need to encourage connections. You decide.

(160–61)

The author devotes two chapters of the book to investigate the advantages and disadvantages of the connective option versus the direct service option in transit networks. He does an excellent job of boasting about the connection’s benefits, including high frequency, long span, simplicity, and usefulness to many destinations, while inconveniences of this option are undermined in many aspects. He does not mention that, for example, transfers in cold weather are a serious challenge for transit users. Persons with disabilities and the elderly, further, may not be able to bear the trouble of...