As commuters are seeing continuous hikes in gas prices in Oregon and across the nation, some are forced to reevaluate their commuting habits.
Public transportation could be a vital alternative to commuters, but how well are public transportation systems in Oregon cities serving the public? How can they serve their communities more efficiently?
Jarrett Walker is a transportation consultant based in Portland — and he’s been answering these kinds of questions for public transit agencies across the nation for the last 35 years.
We’ll hear his thoughts on the current challenges and opportunities ahead for modes of transportation such as buses, light rail, and more.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. As gas prices remain stubbornly high in Oregon and all across the country, some people are rethinking how they get around. Public transit could be an alternative, but how viable is it for Oregonians? How well are public transit systems in Oregon cities serving their communities? How could they do better?
Jarrett Walker is a transportation consultant based in Portland. He’s been helping transit agencies across the nation answer these questions for the last 35 years, and he joins us now. It’s great to have you on Think Out Loud.
Jarrett Walker: Thanks very much.
Miller: I don’t remember asking this before, but I thought we could start by having you read a short part of your bio that you have up in your blog?
Walker: Sure. I’m in this transit planning business because, as a teenager in the 1970s, I got to live through a revolution here in Portland. In 1972, Oregon passed its famous land use laws which are intended to protect agricultural land from car-based sprawl. And in the next few years, Portland took a dramatic series of steps to establish a new direction. They demolished the waterfront freeway to replace it with what we now know as Tom McCall Waterfront Park. They set aside two streets through the center of downtown as a transit mall. They cancelled a long-planned freeway project that would have torn up valuable old neighborhoods in Southeast Portland. And they began planning the light rail system that we now know as MAX.
They made a series of smaller changes block by block, policy by policy that launched the city on a new course of fundamentally less car dependence, more opportunities for walking, cycling and public transit. In my whole career since then, it’s still rare to see a city change direction so fast or so profoundly as Portland did in the 1970s. And of course, the teenage years are a time when you’re very impressionable. So living through that happening right then, as I was a teenager and commuting by bus across the city through a downtown that was growing more vibrant by the day, really taught me to believe in the possibility of rapid and fundamental change in how a city imagines and builds itself.
Miller: I want to pick up on that last part. How aware were you as a teenager, riding a bus in Portland, that the city was going through a major transformation, in terms of the way people could get around or would get around?
Walker: I had an interest in it, so I was following the news and going to city council meetings. I was doing the things you do when you’re interested in this. So yes, I was very aware of it. It was hard not to be aware of it when the physical changes started happening; the transit mall, tearing up the waterfront freeway, these were very dramatic choices. Of course, the debate about the Mount Hood Freeway that would have ripped up Southeast Portland between Division and Powell, was fiery hot at the time. Everyone knew about that.
Miller: It’s interesting that one of the biggest things is something that didn’t happen. If I’d asked you back then to extrapolate from what you were seeing in the ‘70s and imagine public transit in 2026, what would you have said? What did you think Portland was going to be like?
Walker: I thought it was going to continue to grow denser and not just grow horizontally because we’d already made the decision with the ‘72 land use laws that we were not going to allow infinite horizontal growth. We were not going to do what Los Angeles did. So it was going to have to grow denser.
Growing denser meant more people would be walking. More stuff would be in places where public transit could serve it. And it would ultimately mean that there wasn’t room for everyone to drive and that we were going to need a large share of the population to choose other ways of getting around. All that is just geometry. I could have described that to you then.
Details of what got built where, I wouldn’t have tried to predict that. But the basic trajectory is just what we’ve done. Ever since then, we’ve been doing what was geometrically inevitable for a growing city with these limitations.
Miller: What do you think has gotten in the way of that vision?
Walker: Well, obviously, most people aren’t interested in transportation. Most people do not want to think about transportation. They just want to deal with it. So cars are what work for them, so they use their cars and they develop, what we in the business call, a windshield perspective. They describe the world from the point of view of a motorist. They think as a motorist. And they form a concept of their rights that is fundamentally attached to their car rather than to themselves and start talking about their right to do this and that.
That’s always a challenge because what we’re fundamentally in the business of saying is “No, actually rights belong to people and not to cars.” Everyone who is out there moving around in the city has those rights. And if you’re driving your car in a dense city, you’re taking up a lot more space than the pedestrian who is next to you. That has moral consequences that we have to think through. That’s what’s going on underneath everything else.
It’s also why the political support for public transit is so much higher in the city of Portland than it is in many of its suburbs. It’s just the difference of density. It’s people, understandably, evaluating their transportation options based on the specifics of where they live and what’s around them.
Miller: How did you go from being a kid on a bus thinking about and seeing a kind of urban transformation, to becoming a transit consultant, to having this be your job?
Walker: [Laughs] Nobody should follow my path because it involved a PhD in literature along the way. So I was always interested in too many things. I tried out too many things and I didn’t settle into this career until my early thirties. But I had been an intern at the TriMet planning department when I was an undergraduate in the early 1980s, which was a time when the bus system was being completely redone. So that’s really what got me started on my main expertise now, which is that I help cities who want to erase their bus systems, put them down differently and think about different ways the bus system could work.
Miller: Erase their bus systems?
Walker: In the sense of redrawing them from scratch and not being constrained by the past…
Miller: Do cities do that? Just say we have #4, #44, #35 – which actually is a real one right out the window here – and we’re gonna just get rid of everything and start from scratch?
Walker: And notice how entitled you feel to having those bus routes out there.
Miller: I just imagine there are so many people who say, “I’ve taken this bus for years. I connected this place to this place and now you’re gonna come up with an entire new spaghetti map?”
Walker: So we do this in situations where the existing map is spaghetti and we need to make it clear.
Miller: OK, so in Portland, you don’t want spaghetti in the end?
Walker: We don’t. Portland has been doing this in a fairly disciplined way. The huge redesign was in 1977 to 1982, when I was hanging around the agency a lot. So I got to watch that. The bones of the network are pretty good here, and it’s been a matter of just adding things and refining things as we go. It’s also been a process. We did a great piece of work for TriMet a few years ago called Forward Together. That was just about going through the network and making sure that it matched today’s values, as opposed to the values of when it was built. So that’s a lot of what we do.
Miller: The subtitle of your book, “Human Transit” is “How Clearer Thinking About Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives.” What’s not clear about the common ways that people think about or talk about public transit?
Walker: A lot of people see a bus going down the street and it looks really easy to them. It looks like there can’t possibly be much to learn about this, before I form an opinion about it. So a common opinion, for example, is that this bus has all these empty seats. This bus is a big bus that only has seven people on it at the moment when I’m seeing it. Surely, that means that the transit system is wasteful or not being used well enough. And we have to say no, operating cost is mostly labor. Therefore, the cost of the bus is the same whether it’s big or small.
Therefore, transit agencies are being smart to run lots of surplus capacity because demand goes up and down unpredictably. And it’s much better for the bus to be too big than to be too small. That’s a simple example of something that people come to me with all the time. Those buses are too big. They’re too empty. Frequently this comes, of course, from someone out in the suburbs who’s near the end of the line, where, of course, the bus will be emptier.
So it’s just that sort of thing. But there’s a whole lot of things like that have to be understood, if you’re going to think about transit. What I do in the book is explain this is mostly just some simple geometry. I can draw you some pictures to explain why it works this way, to explain why you have to think about the trade-off between ridership goals and coverage goals, for example.
Miller: That’s what I wanted to talk about because it’s another one I’ve heard about. You’ve said that these are potentially at odds, ridership goals – or say, high ridership – and broad coverage. So what are each of these individually and why are they at odds?
Walker: The goal of ridership is tied to a whole bunch of other goals people have for public transit. Transit is not helping us get cars off the road unless people are riding it. The environmental benefits are tied to people riding it. The revenue is tied to people riding it.
Miller: Unless it’s not.
Walker: Unless it’s not. Unless it’s free. But on the other hand, there’s this expectation … every taxpayer in a transit district can stand up and say, “Hey, where’s my service? I pay taxes too.”
But the unfortunate geometric fact is that if we were designing our systems for a goal of ridership, we’d be thinking more like a business, and a business chooses which markets it will enter. It does not go everywhere. McDonald’s does not owe us one store per square mile, all across the country.
Miller: They’re not a public service.
Walker: Exactly. So the question is, are we fundamentally a public service responding just to needs, in which case we should spread our service out, which means spreading it thin, but spread it out so everyone gets a little bit. Everybody gets a bus once an hour. This is what a lot of small-town systems are like. Everybody gets a bus once an hour. Everybody’s got a little something, but the ridership is very low because a bus once an hour is not that useful to most people. But that’s sort of a lifeline. We’ve met everyone’s needs. That’s coverage.
If we’re planning for ridership, the issue is that ridership responds so strongly to frequency, to how often the bus comes. Once a service starts coming every 15 minutes or better, ridership really takes off.
Miller: I don’t imagine that most medium to large sized transit agencies would see this in a truly binary way. The answer has to be some combination of these two, right?
Walker: The answer is in the middle. What I’ve just described are two extremes of the spectrum. So the question is, where are you going to be on that spectrum?
Miller: So how do you help transit? Let’s just talk about TriMet as the biggest one in the state and the one that where we happen to be right now. How do you think they are doing in figuring out where they should be along those two axes, this one axis?
Walker: In the Forward Together process that we worked on for TriMet at our firm, we got a very clear answer to that question, one of the clearest answers I’ve ever gotten. This was three years ago. The board got to the point of basically saying, we are running ridership service and to the extent that we’re running coverage service, predictably low ridership service based on need, we’re doing that in response to equity concerns. In other words, we’re going into places with concentrated areas of disadvantage like East Portland, parts of East Multnomah County.
One of the remarkable things that happened was that, at the same time that TriMet was deleting routes that I thought would be there forever – Council Crest, Lake Oswego, South Shore – very affluent low-density areas lost their service because they were neither ridership nor disadvantaged. Those were the two things that were driving the design.
TriMet has stuck with that. The challenge now at TriMet is that TriMet is facing a very dire budget situation, which we’re going to need to talk about a lot more in this region, over the next year or two.
Miller: And it’s not just TriMet, right? It’s TriMet, Eugene, Lane County, it’s other places?
Walker: TriMet and Lane have particularly nasty problems associated with relying on payroll taxes because they are so volatile. They go up and down with the economy faster than anything. Most other transit agencies in the country are relying on some mix of sales taxes or property taxes. In addition, every transit agency in the country has a couple of big problems. The commute demand that we used to have is permanently gone because of work from home. So transit agencies are retooling themselves.
We were very much part of this at TriMet, with the whole redesign of the Markham Hill routes, for example. It was about saying, “OK, we’re not doing that rush hour commute anymore.” None of the people are doing that. But enormous numbers of people are still getting around all day, all the time, to all kinds of jobs, for all kinds of purposes. And that’s where our high ridership potential is.
So you are seeing transit, but still total ridership is lower than it was pre-pandemic everywhere, and it’s going to continue to be for a while because the nature of the market has changed. The other thing that’s happening is that labor is becoming more expensive. Transit agencies are competing with this explosion of delivery businesses for drivers and mechanics and having to pay more for those skills.
So several things are converging that are creating these structural crises for transit agencies. As a result, many transit agencies are going to be going to their voters in November 2026, or November 2028 at the latest, seeking some sort of new funding source to enable them to avoid service cuts. And that conversation, of some form, has to happen here too.
Miller: While we’re talking about funding, how do you think about the question of whether or not riders should pay? Whether fares should just be free because this is a public service and fares don’t pay for the majority of service in most cases anyway?
Walker: This experiment has been done many times now. What we’re finding is that although you can make the service free, there are a bunch of difficulties associated with security, although those difficulties are really more associated with the credibility of enforcement of the fares, things we saw during the pandemic when they weren’t even trying to keep track of fares. We had lots of behavior problems then. The bigger issue is that although it’s not a majority of the money, it’s a significant chunk of the money. It’s 20-30%, usually in a big transit system. That’s not money that you can just replace easily.
Miller: Especially if you’re losing other pots of money at the same time.
Walker: Exactly. And every North American transit agency, I think pretty much without exception, is running far less service than it could productively run. So if more money appears for the transit system, I would like to spend it on service rather than on making the fares free, because I know that will liberate more people, and create more economic activity and more opportunity.
Miller: You do this work around the country. You travel around the world paying a ton of attention to transit, to maps. You’re a map nerd and a transit obsessive for decades. Are there some “big, easy” – I guess I should put that in quotes – lessons that Portland could learn, should learn from other model cities?
Walker: Portland’s been a model city at some time, and we’ve gone through periods when we’ve deserved to be a model city. I think one of the things we’re facing right now, probably the most challenging thing, is that the rail infrastructure that we’ve built is not all of it going to be as useful as we’d hoped, because of the way development patterns are going and because just the way that commuting is going.
Miller: You say rail, you mean light rail?
Walker: I mean light rail and the commuter rail in Washington County too. But the massive commutes in one direction, that justified that high capacity, that’s not what we have anymore. The future, right now, really requires us to take the fixed route bus seriously because it is the right scale of tool to really get excellent mobility to a large number of people, cost effectively. That’s the most important thing to recognize.
Miller: I turn to one other issue that you wrote about recently, including in an op-ed. It’s about the push to rename Cesar Chavez Boulevard. Your basic argument is that, in retrospect, it was absolutely a mistake to name 39th after a now disgraced labor leader. But your broader point is that regardless of who a person is, it’s a mistake to turn any numbered street into a named street. Why?
Walker: So because I’m going from city to city and trying to navigate all the time, I love … numbered avenues are wonderful. You’ve got to think about the person who’s just arriving in the city, the new immigrant or whatever who’s trying to find their way around. They’re never going to be conscious of the fact that it’s wonderful that 39th Avenue is between 38th and 40th and they don’t have to think about it. But there is less of a cognitive load on them because the street name just tells you where the street is.
Miller: And therefore if – I should say when, it seems pretty clear it’s not gonna be Cesar Chavez forever – you don’t want it to be named after somebody else. You say take it back to 39th?
Walker: Part of the lesson of Chavez, and it’s also the lesson of a lot of our statue debates, frankly, is that humans will disappoint us. On the statue side, I’m in favor of a lot more statues of animals for the same reason. Humans are going to disappoint us, but the math never will. And 39th Avenue is a very useful street name.
Miller: Jarrett Walker, thanks very much.
Walker: Thank you very much.
Miller: Jarrett Walker, founder and principal consultant of Jarrett Walker and Associates, author of the book “Human Transit.”
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