If you aren't a planner or an engineer, can you help the transit and urbanism conversation?
We need to open the conversation about public transport, mobility, and our cities to far more people
I have a confession to make.
I, like many online bloggers, transport commentators, consultants, and advocates have an unfortunate insecurity - I don’t have a city-building degree. To add insult to injury, I also don’t usually talk about the popular subjects of planning or civil engineering, and I sometimes talk about things without referring to specific data or city-building paradigms. So, in this article, I want to make the case that this is not only okay, but actually a positive.
If you’re wondering why I’m writing this piece, it was spurred by comments I sometimes get saying; “I love your videos, but, people won’t take you seriously without a degree, it’s very important for credibility!”. This line of thinking is something I hear a lot of, and I also often talk to advocates or would-be advocates who want to step forward and push for a change but feel they can’t because they aren’t “qualified”, about. I even got into and almost attended an urban studies program because I got sick of hearing this, though a job opportunity (working as a transportation planner I might note) ended up kiboshing those plans. I think this is really destructive, but I also think it’s often seen as conventional wisdom, something which I like to bring question — I’d even say it’s a common thread through all of my work!
Through this piece, I’m going to talk about some common arguments I hear and comment on them.
1) You need to know/use common city-building doctrine.
One of the things I most commonly hear as a reason to dismiss someone’s comments or argument is that they are not sufficiently well versed in the teachings of planning, and this feels like a reasonable concern - but cities and transport systems are complicated! This means that the theory and practice of city-building professions (preferred construction methods, designs etc.) is constantly changing but not always for the better. As with many fields, new ideas catch on as trends but take time to be properly tested.
There are, of course, a lot of examples of this in planning, one of which I particularly like being “complete streets”. The idea behind a complete street is usually about combining many uses and providing a shared space for different modes of transport — to cater not just to drivers, but also to cyclists and pedestrians. As you can see, the idea of a complete street was particularly popular in search around 2012 in the US and Canada.
But maybe that should raise alarm bells? If a complete street is mainly something drawing interest from countries known for suburban sprawl and poor cycling infrastructure (often even when it technically exists), maybe it’s not as good of an idea as it sounds. Anecdotally, this seems to be the case: it’s certainly not universal that combining many uses on one street is avoided — obviously sometimes it’s unavoidable and it can be executed well — but urban planning meccas like the Netherlands seem to be much more in favor of a typology of transport planning that isolates modes: Providing cycling priority corridors which cater to cyclists, transit priority corridors that prioritize transit, and roadways which often take longer, more circuitous routes, but also provide isolation.
This shouldn’t really be surprising of course: city-building professions do have their trends. At one point in the past there was a strong push towards auto-oriented cities with single family homes on giant lots as the cutting edge of urban design, but nowadays we broadly acknowledge that as bad!
At the same time, as there have been all kinds of trends in the mobility and urban transport space, the most important issue in my eyes (and from what I can tell the eyes of many planners and engineers out in the field) — frequency of service of public transit — still does not get nearly the attention it deserves. While city-building professionals do talk about induced demand for driving on highways, the idea that demand for transit is “fixed” while service remains anemic (and thus does not induce any demand) is still quite broadly held.
Now, trends are not entirely bad — in fact, in many cases I think they are good for starting very important conversations. But rather than taking these ideas and running with them or assuming they can be precisely implemented, we should probably be using them to think critically about our established way of doing things. A good example of this is the idea of a “15-minute city” that was very popular in the last few years in city-building circles: clearly an absolute instantiation of a 15-minute city is basically impossible, and probably not even something we would want, but the general idea that most of your regular destinations should be within 15 minutes is pretty solid. This is what I would call a heuristic: a general tenet or learning that people often discover independently that can be applied to push us in the right direction.
I’m going to use these inset blocks to give my “unconventional” thoughts, often bringing up some unusual topics or other things that I think aren’t always considered in the context of transit and cities! With regard to heuristics, a good example can be found in Computer Science, where “hard” NP problems can often not be perfectly solved in a reasonable amount of time, but a slightly less than perfect but still good solution can often be found with a heuristic very quickly.
In the same way, a city-building heuristic might not be able to tell us the right answer, but it can tell us how to make what we have better: it isn’t, for example, a bad idea to question the way we build subways. Another good example of this would be the idea that “more frequent transit is better”: this statement is broadly accepted, but it doesn’t even say how frequent transit should be, just that it should probably be more frequent than it is right now. It pushes us to question.
Another interesting thing to consider is how trends can turn into actualized policy. One big example I can think of is with regard to the floorplate size and shape in buildings. In many modern North American cities, towers are forced to have small floorplates which gives them a skinny “point tower” aesthetic, arguably first made popular in Vancouver. Now, there are a lot of good reasons to have towers with small floorplates on podiums set back from sidewalks such as minimizing wind impacts at ground level, but it’s pretty clear that a lot of bad reasons like subjective aesthetics driven in part by NIMBY-ism have crept in. The issue here is that the downstream effect of this trend-turned-into-well-meaning policy is that buildings are more expensive to build, units are more expensive, land goes to waste, and people eventually can’t afford housing! Unfortunately, a lot of well-meaning policies can lead to negative unintended outcomes — I’d personally put up with some sidewalk wind if it meant I could afford a condo! But we don’t set things up so we can weigh the impacts and the benefits of such policies. There’s also a status quo bias, where you assume that the way things are is how they should stay. People who live in apartments we never build or who ride transit lines we decide against can’t advocate for themselves very effectively!
Of course, that commentators or the generally interested public should simply accept the predominant line of thought on a given issue at a given time is problematic, especially since so often in my experience talking to transit professionals and academics, they call into question whether the latest popular ideas are actually more important than fundamentals such as service quality.
This brings us to the next topic.
2) What is true and what is false? Prove it!
Another thing that comes up a lot of times, often when advocates are going back and forth with people who they mostly agree with on Twitter, is what is true and what is false. People often express opinions about transportation systems (for example, I think low floor light rail is less attractive to riders than metro or x project is too expensive!) and projects and are asked to prove that these opinions are correct. But this can be problematic.
To give you some background, I really don’t like it when the word prove is used in this way. In Mathematics or formal logic to prove something is a very high order request. You must show that from an entirely accepted starting point, using only accepted reasoning, that some conclusion follows. This means it basically impossible to prove whether one transit technology is “overused”, at least in the formal logic context - which I think we should pay more attention to!
It’s not at all clear how one would go about proving something like this, beyond bringing up case study examples. The issue with this is that you can instantly show that something cannot be proven by providing a counterexample. For the example I brought up above, one would seemingly only need to find one example of a light rail system which was better used than a metro on the same corridor to make any proof of this statement invalid, even if it is quite broadly the case that low floor light rail really is less attractive! Of course, if all of this feels a little hard to say for certain or just very pedantic, that’s because it is — city-building and transit just do not lend themselves to universal truths, and even cross comparisons can be hard given the litany of factors that determine how successful a given system is.
Now, sometimes, it’s suggested that some data can easily show whether something is true or false, but this has many pitfalls that I’ll discuss in the next section.
Of course, since so many things are difficult to prove or even argue one way or another, we fall back on things like “this person says x and they have a city-building degree!” or “y is an engineer!”. I’ll address why I think this is not an infallible way of thinking a little later.
The reality is, many things we might very well want to discuss with regard to our cities and transit are not really provable, and in many cases, they aren’t even easily measurable. For example, the quality of wayfinding on a transit system is something that a casual observer could probably opine quite reasonably on, but even an expert will struggle to quantify it. To solve this, I think one of the best approaches we can take is to look at the outcomes (how helpful a transit system’s users find the wayfinding in this case), adjust our approach, and repeat until we struggle to make things better. A great way of making those adjustments? Looking for heuristics and cross comparisons from other locales. An outcome metric I like looking at a lot is ridership: ultimately, a lot goes into it, but it can be measured consistently from system to system. Even when two transit lines have their differences, if one has an order of magnitude more ridership in a similar urban context, something is probably up!
On this issue, my opinion is ultimately that there are very rarely correct answers on topics as complex and interdisciplinary as city-building, but we should accept reasonable methods of assessment that enable incremental progress, and try to consider comparing systems based on broad outcomes.
3) Citation please!
The title of this section is meant to be a bit ironic, because yes: it is entirely reasonable to ask people to cite evidence for bold claims. But, drawing from the last section, if you are looking for definitive proof of something, the messy world of cities will probably leave you disappointed.
Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m not suggesting data or academic papers aren’t a valuable resource for learning about cities, but I do feel we sometimes give them too much credence compared to first hand observation or heuristics. Part of the problem here is that again, some things are really hard to measure, and maybe we shouldn’t always try! It’s sometimes looked down upon but intuition has real value, and it’s often the seed for great heuristics.
Of course, specifically discussing data, there are numerous problems and effects which can potentially obscure the meaning behind something. In some cases, like with ridership, I think the methods for normalizing data are well enough accepted that we can easily cross compare, but for many other metrics there are fundamental problems that make measurement difficult.
One issue particularly relevant to how we measure cities is what administrative unit to use: wise people have argued different answers to this question, but without consensus you get problems like those discussed in an excellent video by “Oh The Urbanity” which shows how WalkScores are often distorted by the administrative unit they are measured over. For example, if one “city” is defined in formal data as just the urban core, while another includes surrounding rural landscapes and farmland, a comparison can’t really easily be made.
Of course, “lying with numbers” or using data in a disingenuous way can be an issue as well. For example, sometimes a transit project is cited as good just because it builds lots of kilometers of new transit, but this isn’t very meaningful without knowing the quality or substance of that transit! Another example of this is suggesting a project is not good because it does not create many new transit users, even though improving the lives of existing users is obviously also super valuable!
I’ve discussed the language we use and how we define specific modes in the past too as being problematic. Often modes of transport aren’t precisely defined, and sometimes those in the field can unintentionally (or sometimes intentionally) mislead the public because of this. For example, in the context of Vancouver, when light rail advocates want to say something negative about the SkyTrain they often distinguish it as “light metro”, but when they want to talk about how popular and widespread “light rail” is, they lump the SkyTrain in.
I mentioned academic papers, and for them it’s much the same. Papers can be an incredibly valuable way of learning and testing ideas, but they aren’t always a great way to make arguments. Academic papers also have issues in terms of accessibility which can make them difficult to use as evidence for or against something. Like with the other data points I’ve brought up, they can be cited and provide great value, but the presence of a supportive academic paper does not validate an argument and the lack of one does not invalidate it.
Someone mentioned something really insightful along this line of thought on Twitter, where they mentioned that even if they hadn’t read many papers, they had used a lot of transit services. I think it’s very hard to say that one of these things is better than the other for providing insights, but clearly the on the ground reality on actual systems is really important and probably also deeply undervalued.
Another wonderful example that was brought up in conversation around this topic was the very famous city-building hero Jane Jacobs. What I think is most interesting and relevant to this conversation about Jacobs is that so many of her observations are not based on census data or income levels (not that these things are not valuable of course) but on first hand observations. I think personally the most impactful part of The Death and Life of Great American Cities was the 2 + 2 = 5 style statements from officials that many neighborhoods which would be destroyed or were planned to be destroyed by expressways were “slums”. This is despite Jacob’s observations on the ground suggesting they were actually vibrant places, full of happy people living full lives. So often, public facing information can simply be false (And in some cases, this is indeed quite intentional).
4) Credentials maketh expert.
The ultimate thing I want to discuss is the idea that credentials and expertise are one and the same. I want to start this section by making clear that as with academic papers, scoring data, and planning trends, credentials are not a bad thing, they can all be very very valuable. The purpose of this post is to try and make the case that we often treat these things as much stronger indicators than they really are, which often leads us to missing important discussions about harder to measure issues.
I do have to start by saying that I think that the idea that you need a degree in something to speak with authority on it is clearly in question. The scale and availability of information to the general public has never been higher, and as anyone who has gone through any form of schooling will know, getting good grades and graduating really is no guarantee of expertise on the topics covered. Of course, the often-pedantic arguments for job candidates to have “relevant” degrees completely ignore that often what makes one degree different from another is just a small number of classes (which you might be able to not even attend and still pass!). Then again, suggesting someone needs a degree to prove their worth is a slippery slope: Next thing you know, it’s not the right degree, or you don’t have enough degrees. Too often degrees and credentials are used as excuses to gatekeep informed observers out of conversations, even if the connection between one’s degrees and the outcomes they deliver are often tenuous.
Of course, you can also possess a degree in city-building and:
Never take transit
Live in a single-family home in the suburbs
Never spend an afternoon casually scrolling google maps
Never read “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”
And more!
This type of disconnect between what people learn in school and what they should be equipped with in the real world is something people generally acknowledge as an issue in most fields. This is a big reason why internships and co-op programs are considered valuable — you can get industry experience. But, at the same time I’ve personally had a number of very frustrating experiences when someone with credentials has told me something like “Sydney Metro is the first cross harbor rail connection for that city! (The Harbour Bridge has two regional rail tracks. . . )” or that “BRT has the same capacity as a subway (this is only true with a Guangzhou- or Bogota-style system - which are rare!)”. When you’re constantly told that degree holders have serious expertise and then you have conversations like this, it can be quite shocking! Another great example of this is that many transit system executives, or board members — many of whom have numerous credentials — often don’t even extensively use the systems they are responsible for. It should go without saying that such situations feel pretty wrong, and that clearly it’s a recipe for big blind spots. I guess to some extent the Dunning Kruger effect is relevant here, if you have serious training in one technical area, you’re probably more likely to overestimate your capability in adjacent areas.
Of course, this isn’t to say degrees are bad: they aren’t and they are generally really good! What is bad is tying perception of knowledge to possession of degrees. This comes back to how our education system and society — at least in the English-speaking world — really seem to undervalue informal learning as well as heuristics. An example of this I can recall from when I used to teach kids math was the insistence by the higher ups that kids solve problems a specific way, even if they could consistently get to the right answer: this obsession with process over results feels like a common thread in a lot of problems we face these days. We should not view the passionate person who learns about their city by reading and observing in their own time as less knowledgeable than someone else simply because they do not have a degree.
Throughout this section on degrees and education, I didn’t even mention that there is such a thing as negative learning. This often (but not always) happens informally, and it’s something that gets really widely discussed. Someone passionate and ready to be the change goes into a big transit agency or government organization and is shot down, or blocked from making the changes they want to. They may become disillusioned and grow to believe that change is impossible, or might even end up thinking that change is bad. The issue here is that what divides success and failures can often be totally random — maybe one organization is extra conservative or a specific transit agency has a city which advocates for funding it more effectively. One of the examples that comes up the most often for me is the widely held but probably not correct idea that freight and passenger rail are fundamentally incompatible.
And that ties into the ultimate message of this article: few things are certain and keeping an open mind is critical. Degrees, data, knowledge, anecdotes, and first-hand experience are all valuable in their own ways, but you don’t necessarily need any of these things to be knowledgeable, but you probably should have an appreciation for them. Questioning the conventional wisdom has a lot of value, and it’s something we could probably use more of, and perhaps one of the best ways of doing so — is by not formally being delivered the conventional wisdom!
Be curious, not judgemental.