When pedantry gets in the way of good transport.
Sometimes "the correct answer" is not the one that makes transport systems easier.
This article is quite meta and discusses the nature of discussions around public transport somewhat more than the transport itself — you’ve been warned!
I was recently reminded from a number of conversations how pedantic the transportation enthusiast community can be.
To be completely clear, I mostly mean this in the neutral sense — pedantry in the sense of being overly happy to adopt things as they are currently technically organized, rather than how they functionally operate. This is something I’ve experienced here and there a lot over my years of covering public transport and infrastructure, but I’ve since really come to believe that this attitude can have negative impacts.
Why does this matter? Again and again I hear people blame politics for transport woes in the English-speaking world (and beyond), but often I see politics as being only a rather visible, as opposed to meaningful problem. Politicians and the political much more easily disrupt processes that are inherently fragile and weak. When you consider that the transit industry in much of the English-speaking world (and again beyond) still frequently makes all matter of technical and planning mishaps, often because of cognitive or status quo biases like I will describe in this piece, I think it’s much harder to place the political at the centre of our problems.
So what exactly is it that I’m describing?
There have been three separate moments when I’ve felt that someone I am talking to about public transport is more interested in the “technically correct” answer to a question than the one that has true meaning.
One example is of counting the number of rapid transit stations in a system based on who operates the stations.
Talking about a station as really being multiple stations because it has multiple physical buildings.
Saying a connection does not exist because stations are not co-located.
The obvious question is, why are any of these things bad, especially given they are correct? I think for me, this is best explained by stepping back and asking why we discuss matters like public transport in the first place.
I often find that in these discussions some find a certain pride in knowing the correct answer in a way that centres the correctness rather than the answer itself. That the number of rapid transit stations in system Y is X is valuable because it shows I understand that system Y is distinct from system Z, not because I know how broad the network is.
This is something I personally felt I ran up against a lot when I was a younger transit advocate in the Toronto-sphere and people were talking about “LRT” left and right. Discussions were obsessively driven by a definition that was too vague to really mean much of anything. It often felt to me that such discussions were more about mutual assuredness and a desire to categorize than about the actual transit services being developed that people would use. I think this is in large part because describing service speed, frequency, and the like is a lot harder than describing what a vehicle looks like and what it definitely does not look like.
I’ve found in the following years that interesting conversation rarely surrounds discussion of things that are “correct” or “incorrect” or even worse “provable” (as a Math guy, the use of prove to refer to something that cannot be proven irks me!), because most issues of transportation planning and policy are far too ill-defined and complex to have correct answers. Rather, there are often better or worse, and simple or sophisticated answers. Funnily enough, I’d argue the actual passenger experience on public transport - which I think is really central to its use, is one of these hard to determine issues — I’ve frequently debated with all manner of people in the past about whether something provides a good, or adequate experience for riders.
Now, my view of public transit is (I like to think) one that is fundamentally centred in that the belief that the rider is the most important element.
One heuristic I like to use for this is my mom, who is not navigationally inclined. If I am describing something to her in a way that clashes with the actual transit organization — “Tokyo has a subway system with 13 lines!” (which is true only if you consider the two independent systems to be integrated and ignore the one-off lines), or telling her to change at a location that isn’t “technically” a connection point — then that means that is probably the simplest description for a user, which should be the default way of describing things to the public — which is a transit agency’s biggest stakeholder group! Not representing a correct history, diagrammatic map, or organizational structure.
So when looking at each of the above three issues, I think we should lean as follows.
The number of stops in a public transport network should be derived from some subset of the stops in a network that are a) connected, b) provide a baseline level of service, and c) meet some measures of integration — like interconnected tunnels or common fare media. Riders don’t care about the colour of the bus — they care if they can comfortably and quickly travel within a system.
If a station functions as a single integrated complex for passenger journeys (i.e. someone might want to travel into one part and out of another) such as with Kings Cross-St. Pancras in London, then it should be seen as a single station. You can use hyphens, you can call it a “complex”, but you must tell passengers making a connection that it is practical and well integrated!
When two stations are sufficiently close together to enable a short walking connection between them, then I wouldn’t really treat them differently than an interchange station with a long underground walk between platforms. In fact, I highlighted this “truth” as being part of the genius of the London Overground network in a recent video.
You might be thinking, “ah again, Reece complains about something weird that I’ve never had a problem with!” which might be fair, I am in the unusual position of making public transport YouTube videos for a large global online audience after all. But, I think moving away from this pedantry is really important — the Overground in London shows how getting beyond it can unlock better transportation for example!
I also think that this attitude of transit discourse being driven by the “word of the law” rather than the “spirit of the law” risks creating really frustrating conversations for advocates. For example, for me, that could look like: “Did you consider placing a [large] station [for all rail services] at Spadina Avenue?” and a public communications person saying “We have considered a station”. The response is not incorrect, and it makes sense given my question — but it doesn’t acknowledge what I really want to know, and that might be because of misunderstanding!
Essentially, pedantry in public transport conversations often actually encourages worse conversations, dumbing things down to the linguistically consistent rather that enabling the type of aspirational thinking we need far more of.
This reminds me of the "Canada line isn't SkyTrain" debates that I've had. Yes, technically it's operated by a separate company, but to the vast majority of riders there is no functional difference. It's a part of the Skytrain network!