Wow. Check this out. Politicians actually trying to solve problems can achieve a lot! www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solu...
Public transit planning consultant and commentator. Author of the book “Human Transit” and the blog HumanTransit.org. The consulting firm is jarrettwalker.com. Also obsessed with literature and plants.
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Wow. Check this out. Politicians actually trying to solve problems can achieve a lot! www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solu...
My last evening in Bern, Switzerland. Few cities seem so confident, and so disinterested in anyone's opinion of them.
Overdosing on wayfinding in Switzerland.
Overdosing on wayfinding in Switzerland.
I blogged for many years at urbanist.typepad.com ... mostly travel writing and assorted ruminations. Now TypePad is shutting down. Should I migrate its archive to WordPress ? What blogging platforms are most likely to survive now?
Per @humantransit.bsky.social "Cities are engines of prosperity, and that to hate the city is to hate your own prosperity. Cities need more transit. Rural areas need more roads. Let’s let everyone pay for what they value." humantransit.org/2025/08/the-...
"The idea is to make city governments helpless while continuing to blame them for everything that goes wrong in cities," writes @humantransit.bsky.social . "It plays well in conservative media, but it’s not fair and it’s certainly not democracy."
The Fall of Philadelphia humantransit.org/2025/08/the-... via @humantransit.bsky.social
A Swiss Postbus makes its way up the Lauterbrunnen Valley, viewed from a gondola climbing the steep valley walls. That that's not an articulated bus; it is pulling a trailer with more seats. Postbuses provide both mail and public transit for rural Switzerland.
If you didn't manage to see this calmly furious and defiant statement by @govpritzker.illinois.gov yesterday, please find 12 minutes to see or hear it today. Best, strongest statement by sr official of where we stand and what is needed now. Civil duty to see it. www.msnbc.com/deadline-whi...
"The Republican-controlled #Pennsylvania State Senate seems to be motivated by pure cultural animus toward urban life." Why is funding being cut to SEPTA, #Philadelphia 's transit agency? Jarrett Walker, aka, @humantransit.bsky.social, has the lowdown: humantransit.org/2025/08/the-...
Clear-eyed piece about why state legislators across the country are evidently choosing to let transit fail: They dislike cities and the people who run and live in them.
Reupping this thread and @humantransit.bsky.social’s column =>
It probably helps that the Minister of Transport is an engineer!
Santiago de Chile has an ongoing expansion program for its metro that will add 75 (seventy-five!!) km to its network by 2033 for 7.3 billion USD. It's like adding more than a second métro of Montréal-worth for 50% more of the projected cost of adding 6km to the blue line.
In the Washington DC metro, many of the ads are for defense contractors.
High transit ridership is diverse ridership -- diverse in every dimension: wealth, trip purpose, physical ability, gender, language, nationality, race ... Always push back on cultural stereotypes about "who rides public transit." Plan as though everyone counts.
Nonsense. Plenty of people ride transit if transit is useful. The people who need to see a police presence everywhere to feel safe aren’t numerous enough to matter.
Also very bad for transit ridership.
Thoughts?
If the US government had to pay for medical care of its citizens, it might care more about climate change impacts, air and water pollution, gun violence, traffic crashes, the food we eat, etc. It’s past time for single payer healthcare.
The locations are fine. The infrastructure is poor!
Fine piece on how a theatrical military occupation to fight illusory crime is scaring away customers and tourists in Washington DC. Coming to a big US city near you. A Summer Afternoon in Washington D.C., by James Fallows open.substack.com/pub/fallows/...
I just really want to drill into this great post by @humantransit.bsky.social, who has forgotten more about transit and urban planning than most of us will never know.
City-bashing has been a feature of US politics since Jefferson. A virulent form has re-emerged recently. But @humantransit.bsky.social notes: "None of which changes the fact that cities are engines of prosperity, and that to hate the city is to hate your own prosperity." Hang that on the wall too
“Let everyone pay for what they value.” @humantransit.bsky.social Yes. humantransit.org/2025/08/the-...
If you care about cities, transit and urban economies, read this today👇. And if you live in Chicago or San Francisco or Portland or Seattle, demand meaningful action on transit funding.
🚏🚍 “A city whose high density makes transit essential for the city’s functioning will soon not function very well. Service cuts will push transit riders back into cars (either as drivers or as people being given rides) triggering increased congestion. It will also cause people to lose jobs…”
There is no way to raise fares to a level that would cover the budget gap because the ridership loss would be so massive.
studying how different places handle urban policy (especially public transit) is an inside track to a more accurate understanding of their material politics at large
I still vividly remember reading Human Transit while visiting family in Philadelphia
“When dense cities are not allowed to fund their services in the way that reflects their needs and values, it almost guarantees that the city will be a site of failure — failure that will be especially visible to the media because in dense cities everything is more visible.”
A must read from one of the brightest minds in the transit space.
As usual, wonderful and concise piece from Jarrett.
"the Republican-controlled Pennsylvania State Senate seems to be motivated by pure cultural animus toward urban life."
If you’re into public transit, and you’re not following public transit consultant Dr. Jarrett Walker (PhD, Stanford, Humanities), then you’re not doing Transit Sky correct. SEPTA is about to have to cut the Main Line and tons of bus routes if the service cuts materialize.
I am already here. But a lot of good people are still there.
Some of us have trained our brains to be hard to cook.
The easy solution to this problem is to stay in the Following tab. Staying on Twitter is like staying in any country whose government you don't like. Switching costs are not always worth it. I just don't pay them, don't use "For You," and don't buy from their ridiculous advertisers.
It's this bridge. My photo is taken at the riverside but the bluff is quite high on both sides of the river.
What the Swiss do with the dead space under a bridge. Why not a dance studio? Bern, Switzerland.
I wrote an unusually strongly worded thing about the transit crisis in Pennsylvania, which is coming soon to Oregon and Illinois. humantransit.org/2025/08/the-...
The German word Rathaus does not mean a house full of rats, but there is always a moment in the act of translation where the mind alights with brief pleasure on that possibility. [Rathaus = "talking house" = (roughly) city council chambers.]
Throughout history, the shape and size of cities has been defined by travel time. Nice overview of "Marchetti's constant". www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...
There are lots of more recent podcasts. jarrettwalker.com/consulting-s...
In Pennsylvania, the Republican state senate is not just trying to wreck the transit system of Philadelphia. It's also trying to cut the train that would bring crowds from Philadelphia to the capital, Harrisburg, to trouble their repose. 2/2
To understand why US states can be so hostile to the big cities that drive their economies, the location of many state capitals in small inaccessible towns is a major factor. Try shipping a credible sized crowd of protesters from Anchorage to Juneau or Miami to Tallahassee. 1/
Portland is facing dire transit service cuts and we're being told our 30 year old indoor sports arena is out of date and taxpayers must fix it. Transit uses obsolete infrastructure every day. It would be nice to update the rail system so it can run at normal speeds on hot days, for example.
Bus 12 to ZPK is also insanely frequent. A very nice trolleybus. You only notice you’re not on a tram when on the cobblestones in the old city.
Sounds very American!
Leeds UK: I'll be speaking on 9 Sep about "Freedom in the City: An Approach to Bus Network Reform." Details here: tps.org.uk/events/freed...
Articulated trolleybuses on good old double overhead wires.
That's the one that was going by. Literally every 5 minutes or less all the time.
Having lunch at an outdoor café in Bern, Switzerland, I know it's impossible to photograph how incredibly frequently the buses are coming by, and yet I keep trying. I want to photograph how useful and liberating the service is, but all I get is a picture of a bus.
That's an important point. Fewer bus stops mean more people gather where there is shelter.
"In terms of its underlying causes, the current homelessness crisis is very nearly the opposite of the 20th century urban crime wave. It is a product of affluence, inequality, and political sclerosis." publiccomment.blog/p/notes-on-a...
No, if anything stop spacing tends to be wider where more of the society depends on public transit, because there is more understanding of the need for speed and reliability.
Australian urban stop spacing is mostly wider than US in my experience, even at comparable densities. Not sure what car ownership has to do it.
True.
The sweet spot is usually 4 to 5 stops per mile. If you want to go deep on this, there's a discussion of it in the new edition of my book Human Transit, them have in the chapter called "touching the city". Thanks!
If you aren't a public transit geek I despair of convincing you how important this chart is. Slow buses cut people off from opportunity. Stop respacing is controversial (everything is controversial) and yet the savings and benefits are huge. (We can help.)
One more DB train today, from Mannheim to Bern. Wish me luck! So far DB is batting 0% with me. Looking forward to some Swiss clockwork as soon as I get over the border.
My favorite adage in public transit: "Frequency is freedom" - @humantransit.bsky.social
Just landed in Frankfurt. All DB trains in all directions appear to be late.
Kansas City was one of the first US transit systems to go fare-free. Now the fares are coming back. The city & transit agency had a choice: Eliminate bus service or charge for trips. They chose the latter. (Low-income riders can still ride free.) Good move. Service quality > Free fares
The shorter point here, totally available for any elected Democratic leader who cares to get in front of a camera or make a TikTok video, is that America's blue cities are uniformly safer than its violent, crime-ridden red states. Murder rates in blue states are small fractions of red states', etc.
California's may be the most inspiring of US state flags. I wish Oregon had the courage to lead with its beaver.
Hang out with me drawing transit networks! I'll be doing my fun master class in transit network design is in Portland Oct 30-31. It's for anyone who interacts with transit planning on the job, as well as for advocates and aspiring planners. Please share! humantransit.org/2025/07/new-...
Remember, you have the right to log off social media.
In the words of @humantransit.bsky.social "Technology Never Changes Geometry" humantransit.org/2016/07/elon... Cars simply can't scale to meet the needs of cities because they are extremely space inefficient.
Source: www.indystar.com/story/news/l...
In every debate about extending public transit into a US suburban area, we always hear this. (Source in first reply.)
Finally got around to writing more about transit access to big box retailers, particularly the Ontario experience. Despite Canadian operators making a bit more of an effort to serve places like Walmart, the design of these retail centres makes it difficult. seanmarshall.ca/2025/08/13/b...
Americans are being conditioned to think of crime as an urban issue. Ask why. Alabama's murder rate is far higher than New York City's. Urban crime is not worse than rural crime. It's just more visible. In cities everything is more visible. So be careful what you blame city leaders for.
As someone who has lived my whole adult life in cities deemed “dangerous”—NYC, NOLA, and SF—I think a lot about how dense cities require patience, calm, and tolerance in the midst of social difference, which are of course exactly the civic virtues that the right resents being told to cultivate.
Hang out with me drawing transit networks! I'll be doing my fun master class in transit network design is in Portland Oct 30-31. It's for anyone who interacts with transit planning on the job, as well as for advocates and aspiring planners. Please share! humantransit.org/2025/07/new-...
US transit agencies are always helping out in emergencies, such as Portland's heat wave this week.
I don't think it's a coincidence that so many mayoral candidates are running on platforms that unapologetically promise to give people great mobility options besides driving — and they're winning their primaries by *massive* margins. Wrote about urbanism as a campaign issue in Seattle & beyond.
Hot take, people who hate cities shouldn’t be in charge of cities
I don't think most people understand how our brains have adjusted to the high speeds of driving. What once felt fast feels normal. And thus anything slower feels like unacceptable impediment. It isn't just better insulation and shocks (although it helps - my '84 Volvo *told you* when you hit 60 mph)
"Where you can go limits what you can do. If we increase your access, we’ve expanded the options that you have in your life. Isn’t that what freedom is?" ~ @humantransit.bsky.social humantransit.org/basics-acces...
Seattle has its own home-grown Onion.
"PhD-level experts in your back pocket" is a completely nonsensical description of AI but a pretty good description of social media if you follow the right people
Important thread from a planner on the front lines of Rhode Island's public transit apocalypse. The same crisis is playing out in Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Oregon. In each case, only the state legislature has the power to stop deep transit service cuts that would take years to restore.
Hang out with me putting colored lines on maps! My two-day intensive course in transit network design comes to Portland, October 30-31. Details: humantransit.org/2025/07/new-... Please share!
Seattle area transit agencies will now have to pay tolls on state highway bridges. Since the state government helps fund transit operations, this is just sending money in circles. Pointless and silly. washingtonstatestandard.com/2025/06/19/t...
So they will have to pay for every HOV+ lane they use, even though they are part of the point of the lane? Does ST have to pay to run trains over the lake?
This is insane. Forcing local governments to subsidize state government ...
Tariffs that increase the price of buses are a great way to transfer money from impoverished transit agencies to the federal government. www.smartcitiesdive.com/news/trump-t...
I am a consultant working within the system. Consultants are always making judgments about where they can be outspoken and where they can't. I'm already the most outspoken transit consultant I know. Don't judge me by the standards of an advocate. That's not my position in the ecosystem.
See Spokane, a great and well-supported network in a landscape that's not that different.
We helped design a great new bus network for Albuquerque (now the largest US city with free fares) but they are having so much trouble hiring drivers that it may takes years to implement. us3.campaign-archive.com?u=306fc3b210...
Yes, a train that is going in a circle is not taking anyone very directly to their destination.
I know it well. A city centre rail loop makes some sense at Auckland's scale now but in a century, if public transport continues developing, it may be a nuisance. Loops are hard to extend.
Very few people want to travel in circles, yet Sydney, Melbourne, and Chicago, among others, ended up with rail networks built around compact city-center rail loops. If you were planning these networks from scratch, would any of these loops make sense today?
I don't think anyone would build the Melbourne or Sydney loops today. The Auckland one has some logic given the city's scale.
Naming for suburban termini is a nuisance because each Metra line has several of those, as some trains go further than others. There's been a bit of a trend away from that (see BART for example). I'd just give them letters or numbers. Definitely too many for colors
This iconic Fabian Todorovic cartoon is still one of the best I’ve seen at illustrating the remarkable amount of space we surrender to cars, leaving little space left for everyone and everything else. The text added later makes the bonus point that many drivers still manage to complain about it.
cc: @aucklandtransport.bsky.social @greaterauckland.bsky.social