What it all comes down to is "the geometry of liberty.” The phrase comes from Portland, Oregon-based Jarrett Walker, a world-traveling thinker about public transportation and author of “Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking about Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives.”
Walker unpacked the meaning behind this declaration during a talk Tuesday evening at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, sponsored by The Partnership for Smarter Growth and RVA Rapid Transit. Walker and his team are redesigning bus service in the city of Richmond. Their suggested model favors fewer stops with more riders.
Walker is described as a “transit guru,” and fits the part — wise, but humorous in his teachings, a pragmatic idealist who doesn’t care what buses or trams look like, but that they get where they should be going on time and often. He speaks, too, in parables. Like the one about Houston (Houston? With transit? Who knew?), where Walker's firm facilitated the reorganization through what sounds like an arduous process. He warned the audience members that in discussing altering the Richmond bus lines, they should prepare for vehement public forums. (Note: Oh, don’t we know about some raucous debates — from baseball stadiums to the dismemberment of live oak tress for public art?) In Houston, Walker says, the message became clear: “The service is terrible; don’t change anything.”
He acknowledged that the present discussion centers around just one line – Pulse bus rapid transit up Broad Street between Rocketts Landing and Willow Lawn — and he insisted that “It’s time to change the subject to what it means to have a great transit system for the whole city.”
Houston restructured its system without busting its budget, with fewer lines that nonetheless go farther and bring buses more often to those that want and need them. In some cases, however, users must go a couple of extra blocks to their stop. Walker gave the example of the GRTC Monument Avenue bus that doesn’t run often enough, so people head over to Broad Street, where several lines are run.
For the record, I took the Broad Street No. 6, with some 25 other fatigued day’s end riders, to Ninth Street and walked the block to St. Paul’s. Coincident to this event, while conducting research on another subject, I turned up a “flame war" on the Times-Dispatch Letters-to-the-Editor page during the early months of 1973. Back then, the buses were run by the Virginia Transit Co., the private organization that dismantled the streetcar system and implemented bus service. That year, though, federal, state and local funds purchased the VTC and made it into the Greater Richmond Transit Co., at first wholly owned by the City of Richmond (Chesterfield bought half in 1989, but then did little about it).
Henrietta Near’s Jan. 20, 1973, letter expressed views seeking improved transit in Richmond, to not just save natural resources, but prevent the further cleaving of the city through more highway construction. She cited successes then in Denver and the Shirley Highway express into Washington, D.C., and wrote that enhanced public transit should be commensurate with the city’s growth. She asked if “Richmond public bodies have looked into any real alternatives to the expressway since the 1960s?” Near received a rebuke on Jan. 31 from Richard A. Velz, who tish-toshed her about American acceptance of “the automobile as a ‘right' for all, from teen-agers to the last breath of the oldsters." He added, "No matter how appealing it is to consider getting them into buses, there just ain’t no way to do it!” Velz went on to argue that transit is a constant money drain and services across the country were closing, and that city buses operated at a loss underwritten by already burdened taxpayers.
On March 2, Stephen L. Atlas derided Velz’s “simplistic dismissal of mass transit for Richmond.” Atlas acknowledged the system's shortcomings: “The buses do not go where most people live and shop," he wrote, adding that there were few cross-town options, nothing into Chesterfield or the shopping corridors of Parham Road and the Midlothian Turnpike, and the service was too infrequent. “Have you ever tried to take a bus to a game at Parker Field [The Diamond’s immediate precursor] or to an evening play at the Virginia Museum?” Still, he didn't think these “sufficient cause to ‘give up’ on public transportation for Richmond.” He wondered if public subsidy and resourcefulness might assist in the creation of a public transit system to offer “a real alternative to those who can’t or don’t want to drive and reduce traffic congestion.”
Again, this was 1973, and GRTC didn’t even exist. Yet – sporadic conversations about transit in Richmond – heating up due to the Pulse bus rapid transit project – haven’t advanced much farther than those three letters. And as one audience member pointed out after Walker’s talk, every year, GRTC must go to City Council and beg for funds like a Dickensian orphan.
After all these years, there still isn’t a dedicated revenue stream to help support the system. Another audience member from Chesterfield County, which owns half of GRTC, pointed out that neighborhood planners there have created a cul-de-sac archipelago that is nearly inaccessible by bus. Henrico – don’t even ask. Yet the Richmond region, with its 1.2 million inhabitants and counting, gets busier with greater demands on more crowded streets and roads.
Walker responds, “Well, you just have to create a service that eventually will make potential partners jealous and want to join you.” A regional approach must come, but first, Richmond needs to get its own buses to run on time to more places more often without jacking up the rates too much.
You cannot fit an elephant into a wine glass, Walker says, and transit resembles this analogy in terms of space. The more cars on the road, the worse they work due to traffic. Whether electric or driverless, there’s only so much space for them. The more people using transit, the less congestion. “Increasing ridership,” he declares, “increases liberty.” He referred to the “wall around your life,” that is, the bubble of places where you can potentially get to just by walking, or presumably also biking, and where you can get to in walk-plus-transit intervals of 15, 30, 45 minutes and an hour.
“Where you can go determines what you can do,” he says. Good transit is built upon frequency, connectivity and reliability. “Speed is important, but frequency is overwhelming,” he emphasized. Frequency equals freedom — an hourlong wait for a bus is useless. And that’s one of Richmond’s problems, particularly in the less-serviced East End and South Richmond.
Preceding Walker, brief remarks were given by Rev. Ben Campbell, board member of RVA Rapid Transit and co-chair of the Clergy Committee, “This Metro Richmond Planning plan is for 2040, we want it for 2020 … We need to be a real city with real public transportation.” Walker and colleague Michelle Poyourow with Michael Baker Associates, are collaborating with RVA Rapid Transit “to get this Richmond Transit Plan to work making local routes better in conjunction with the BRT.”
Smarter Growth board member and senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center Trip Pollard described the BRT as “a huge step in connectivity,” under construction and slated for completion next year. Challenges for the Pulse include surrounding land use involving affordable housing and commercial uses and rezoning. The Richmond Regional Transit Vision Plan, a collaboration of several agencies and organizations, has a final draft about to be released up for public comment next month and finalizing in December. (Here’s part of the pitch.)
“This transit vision plan addition to BRT and local route improvements will increase access to a growing population and give a lot more jobs access to transit, and increases frequency," he said. "Another piece is looking at the base challenge, the political challenge, getting not only the city but surrounding counties on board. Some really heavy lifts are needed make this plan a reality. It’s very doable, very feasible and a very necessary component if we’re going to achieve a vision of transit in Richmond.”
Back in the '90s, a group of Chicago women parodied the Joan Osborne song about God being a stranger on the bus — by complaining about the reliability of the Chicago Transit Authority — as entertainment for an annual journalism event. I’ll leave you with this, because when it comes to transit, you start with what you got and work to make it better.