Jarrett Walker


Jarrett Walker is a transit consultant and native of Portland, Oregon. His Houston bus redesign was covered in the media, and he has worked in cities in North America and Oceania.
Walker frames discussions about public transportation in terms of geometry,, including the ridership coverage tradeoff saying that geometry gives a kind of certainty about decision-making and predictions. For instance, the Bay Area doesn't have one center, it has at least three anchors, with an obstacle in the middle.

Early life and education

Walker was raised in Portland, Oregon in the 1970s, where he became interested in transit issues while using the TriMet bus system. Trimet is still operating buses in Portland to this day. Some major changes include a new MAX Light Rail system and a bus redesign in the 1980s.
Walker lived in Southern California, receiving his bachelors degree from Pomona College in 1980. He went on to receive his Ph.D in theater arts and humanities from Stanford University in 1996, and has used this knowledge to be published in the peer-reviewed Shakespeare Quarterly.
Walker is the President of Jarrett Walker + Associates, the consultancy that contracts with public transit agencies. In addition, he has a blog and a book. He has given many interviews, talks, and written for The Atlantic's Citylab.

Career

Walker has written peer reviewed papers in the Journal of Public Transportation including "To Predict With Confidence"
Walker has written for New York Times, The Atlantic, and appeared on WBUR-FM.
As part of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Jarrett Walker + Associates received between $150,000 and $350,000 and $1 million in federally backed small business loan from Umpqua Bank as part of the Paycheck Protection Program. The company stated it would allow them to retain 14 jobs.

Walker's philosophy

Jarrett Walker generally keeps discussions about transportation away from prediction or new technologies and instead keeping focus on geometry and freedom In addition, Walker's position as a consultant means that he often frames his discussions around the values of the agency contracting him for business. In other words, he is 'only stating geometric facts', or presenting choices, which the agency can then choose whether they want one thing or another. This usually has to do with the ridership coverage tradeoff. As the name implies, it is a tradeoff, so there are different things to gain and lose by choosing either. In this sense, his redesigns represent the values of others.
Another staple of Walker's philosophy is the interpretation of freedom of movement as a form of liberty.. In this way, by improving people's transportation access to their city, he is liberating them.
In his book Human Transit he lists seven criteria of good public transit:
  1. It takes me where I want to go – coverage
  2. It takes me when I want to go – span
  3. It’s a good use of my time – frequency
  4. It’s a good use of my money – price
  5. It respects me – cleanliness and safety
  6. I can trust it – reliability
  7. It gives me freedom to change my plans – frequency again
Walker advocated for an "urbanist tea party" in 2013, suggesting the rise of the city-oriented or mayor-driven development, which was highlighted by James Fallows.
Walker has explained that the modern streetcar movement doesn't live up to the hype, as its drawbacks and costs take away from a frequent-service transit network. Walker has stated "billions are thrown at light rail while the overlooked bus is ".
Walker has also dissected the promises of modern rideshare services like Lyft and Uber, which are often compared to transit or hailed as a replacement for transit. The efficiency, both real and theoretical, of rideshare comes nowhere close to even a relatively low-density bus service.
As the coronavirus pandemic lockdowns caused sharp reductions in ridership on transit, Walker reminded the New York Times that transit is "not a business. And nowhere has that been more obvious than now. The sensible fiduciary thing to do would be to shut things down as quickly as possible, furlough the entire staff and wait. They’re not doing that because they’re expected to provide an essential service."

Principles of https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Fundamentals_of_Transportation/Network_Design_and_Frequency bus design

A central part of Walker's recommendation revolve around a frequent grid of buses, saying "frequency is freedom", rather than the common focus of coverage. As an analogy, he says that a bus frequency of 15 minutes is like if a car could only leave its home every 15 minutes.
Given any arbitrary level of transit service, it can be deployed in a number of different ways. Some ways are competing goals, for example, service in the weekday versus service on the weekend.
One more advanced side-effect of a grid is that the connecting services make one another useful, like a kind of network effect.
The general principles of Walker's style of bus redesign have garnered attention not just for the ideas they underscore, but for how fast it can be implemented
Cities which Walker helped redesign their bus networkTime implementedWeekday Ridership IncreaseWeekend Ridership Increase
Houston201511%30%
Anchorage2017-1%-3% Saturday, +20% Sunday
San Jose/Silicon Valley2019N/AN/A
Columbus20171.6-3.6%6% Saturday, 24% Sunday
Richmond201817%?

The Houston METRO system saw an 11% increase in ridership on weekdays a year after the redesign went into effect, and 30% growth on weekends
In Anchorage, much of the focus was on how the existing decrease in ridership year over year slowed down and eventually turned into ridership gains two years after the redesign.

Twitter feud with Elon Musk

Walker gained a significant amount of media attention as a result of a dispute he had with Elon Musk. In December 2017, Musk expressed his disdain for public transit and reiterated his preference for individual transportation in response to an audience question during the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference. Walker criticized him on Twitter, stating that "Musk's hatred of sharing space with strangers is a luxury that only the rich can afford," referring to the theory that planning a city around the preferences of a minority yields an outcome that usually does not work for the majority. Musk responded with "You're an idiot," later saying "Sorry Meant to say 'sanctimonious idiot.'" This dispute led to a broader debate about Musk's opinions on transit, including during a segment on Fox Business Network in which Walker spoke with Stuart Varney, and prompted an outpouring of people sharing their stories of the connections and community formed on transit, using the hashtag #GreatThingsThatHappenedonTransit.

Backlash

Some of the bus operators which Walker has been involved with directed service changes towards ridership or connecting services, or even just change. Increased public involvement in the redesign process has resulted in unfavorability among members of the public and news outlets who call the redesigns service cuts, often disagreeing that they are a good idea Part of this stems from the ridership-coverage tradeoff, where some residents of areas with low demand feel that they should keep their buses.
In addition, Randal O'Toole, a noted transit skeptic, has been a vocal skeptic of the implications of Jarrett Walker's work.