Who's transit system?

In A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, he makes the case for neighborhoods contracting their own transit provider to connect them with a network of other places. The well-intentioned premise is that neighborhoods know best how to serve themselves, and that a mandated system aways leads to the common service problems that we see today (I'm recalling this from memory since my checked out library book was just recalled!)

With that in mind, yesterday I tried to go to a beach with a friend in Boston. I didn't really care what beach it was, though a little nature would have been better than a city beach. I checked my options on the North and South Shore using Google Maps and found that the commuter trains running each way weren't frequent enough to make a few hours at the beach possible. I also found that I had no access to a car that day. Therefore I settled on Revere Beach, which is right on the Blue Line subway. It would take about a 50 minutes to get there from my local subway stop, fine:



The equivalent car ride is 23 minutes, though I would have gone to a nicer beach with a car. Also, the subway ride would be shorter if the Blue Line connected directly to the Red Line, which is something that has been planned and should have happened a long time ago. We road down to the point of the Blue Line transfer at Government Center, at which point the driver informed us that the Blue Line was closed for maintenance and that buses would serve the route. I had run into this problem a couple weeks ago on the weekend, and it turns out that they have been renovating station platforms at two stops on the weekends. But the announcement made it sound like the entire line was closed, not just two stations (I found no evidence of the former online.) Thus my quick decision was to remain on the Green Line up to North Station and simply walk to Revere Beach via Charlestown. Well, anyone who knows the area would chuckle at my folly. The walk is several miles and the Tobin Bridge is not accessible to pedestrians, meaning a costly detour of several more miles. We ended up riding a delayed bus back to downtown and gave up on the beach.



Failed transit experiences are not uncommon to me, but this one was especially painful. I really wanted to go to a nice beach where I could escape the city, but it happened that I failed to even make it to a lousy city beach.

Getting back to A Pattern Language, I think that Alexander is wrong to advocate contracted transit service. Such service ties you to a bus or shuttle and eliminates the possibility of rail, unless you somehow set up tracks and let competitors share them. That may work on an inter-city network, but it's probably impossible to implement within a region. However, I like the idea of neighborhoods taking control of their transit, rather than the city, region, or state making political decisions about how and how much to serve them. In a compact place like the Boston metro area, it's fairly easy to identify neighborhoods by their centers. I live in west Somerville but my local neighborhood center is Ball Square. The people who live near me might say that Powderhouse Square or Magoun Square are their centers, even though the former lacks retail and both lack good transit. In a compact place the neighborhood center must be less than a ten minute walk away. In a modern sprawl suburb I would be okay with fifteen minutes. It would be wise to identify the members of a neighborhood center and have representatives figure out how to serve them with transit. These representatives would meet with other representatives along each transit corridor that concerned them to find solutions. A city or regional facilitator would assist the group. Representatives would only be concerned about the corridor up to the point that it got them to a well-functioning subway or train station. (If that station wasn't functioning adequately, a higher scope group would have to address it.) In most cases the representatives would need work out improvements to a corridor to increase the level of service. They would identify the ideal service and then use software tools or an expert to determine its cost and funding options. It might turn out that the ideal service required a $100 million dollar investment to build a modern streetcar to a subway station what was two miles away from the end of the corridor (The Grand/Lakeshore to downtown Oakland neighborhoods in Oakland, CA are a perfect example of this.) The representatives would learn the per capita cost for capital and maintenance of the new line, given the total number of adults in the neighborhoods. It might be possible to subtract from this federal and state grants, as well as the operation costs saved by eliminating the existing inadequate service. The software or expert would also estimate the per capita benefits, quantifying savings in car use, pollution reduction, freed up space (from parking lot and car reduction), appreciated real estate, etc. Then the group would initiate legislation that created assessment fees on the residents and businesses to fund the system. The legislation would require a vote from only those in the neighborhoods and express in concrete language the exact service, costs, and estimated benefits. Of course, no such voting process exists where neighborhoods one or more cities can exclusively vote for something.

This fantasy of mine is unrealistic because we have such weak neighborhood cohesiveness. But the current method of top-down transit decisions is clearly failing in a political environment where public spending is demonized and taxes are abhorred. There's no easy top-down fix to my problem of getting to a beach in a reasonable amount of time on transit. It requires that each neighborhood care about their transit system and that the regional service be taken seriously by all levels of government. If I lived in Europe it would easy, but they don't seem to mind sending trains everywhere at great cost and benefit to their people.