Jarrett Walker (born 1962) is an American transit consultant and author. He has a consulting firm based in Portland, Oregon, that has worked on projects across North America, Europe, and Oceania.[1] Walker is the author of the blog Human Transit and book of the same name.[2][3]
Career
In the 1970s, Walker became interested in transit issues while using Portland's TriMet bus system.[4] He later worked as a planning intern at TriMet.[5]
Walker is the president of Jarrett Walker + Associates, a consultancy that contracts with public transit agencies.[6] He and his firm have completed transit redesign projects in dozens of cities throughout the world, including Houston, Moscow, Auckland, and Dublin.[7]
In 2011, Walker published Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking about Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives with Island Press. In 2024, he published a revised edition that expands on his ideas of access, meaning the freedom to do things that require leaving home.[2][8]
In December 2017, Walker attracted media attention after publicly feuding with billionaire and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Musk expressed his disdain for public transit and reiterated his preference for individual transportation in response to a conference audience question.[16] Walker criticized him on Twitter, stating that "Musk's hatred of sharing space with strangers is a luxury (or pathology) that only the rich can afford."[17][16][18] Musk responded with "You're an idiot", before saying: "Sorry... meant to say 'sanctimonious idiot.'"[19][20][21][22] The dispute led to a broader debate about Musk's opinions on transit.[22]
Walker's planning philosophy
Walker frames discussions about public transportation in terms of an area's geometry and how it influences a transit network's ridership and coverage (also known as the "ridership-coverage trade-off").[23][24][25] He argued that an area's physical features (for example, the Bay Area's bay) significantly impact a transit network's ideal design and potential ridership.[26]
Walker has argued that transit agencies' focus on predictions and new technologies distracts from necessary improvements to existing transportation systems.[27][28] He has also stated that when working as a consulting planner, he views his role as "only stating geometric facts", or presenting potential designs for the agency employing him to consider. He typically presents a variety of designs, with some more heavily focused on increasing ridership and others more centered around increasing coverage.[29][30] In Houston, Walker proposed creating a grid of bus routes with frequent service instead of focusing on expanding physical coverage, and the transit agency ultimately implemented his recommendations, reporting an 11% increase in ridership on weekdays and a 30% increase on weekends a year later.[31][32]
Walker has often asserted that "frequency is freedom" – frequent transit service helps people better access their communities,[33] and that buses are often the most affordable way to expand transit service.[34][35][36] He has observed that people who regularly travel by car often don't grasp the importance of frequency, and thus undervalue it: "It's very difficult to get motorists to understand that importance. I tell them to imagine a gate at the end of your driveway that only opens once every half an hour."[37][38][39][40]
In his book Human Transit, he lists seven requirements for a good public transit network:[3]
It takes me where I want to go – coverage
It takes me when I want to go – span
It's a good use of my time – frequency
It's a good use of my money – price
It respects me – cleanliness and safety
I can trust it – reliability
It gives me the freedom to change my plans – frequency again
In the 2024 Revised Edition of his book Human Transit, Walker puts new emphasis on the concept of access (sometimes called accessibility) by which he means your freedom to do anything that requires leaving home.[41] His firm analyzes service change proposals not by predicting ridership — which Walker argues is unpredictable[42] — but instead by measuring how a plan expands or reduces where a person could get to in an amount of time they are likely to have in their day. He argues that while ridership is unpredictable, access analysis captures the way that the design of the network influences ridership. He also argues that access is a measure of many other things that people value, including the economic viability of the city and the experience of personal freedom.
Walker has criticized claims that modern ride-share services like Lyft and Uber are equivalent to or a potential replacement for public transit, arguing that ride-share services are much less efficient than even a relatively low-density bus service.[35][43] As lockdowns resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic caused sharp reductions in ridership on transit, Walker was featured in a New York Times article as saying 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."[44]
Walker's proposed redesigns have sometimes faced criticism from city residents, advocacy groups, or news agencies. In Dublin, Walker proposed consolidating the complex bus network into central "spines" with more frequent bus service.[45] The public transit authority received over 72,000 comments from the public, of which a large portion criticized the proposal as service cuts, despite overall increases to both service frequency and geographic coverage.[46][47][48] In addition, libertarian Randal O'Toole, a noted transit skeptic, has been a vocal critic of the implications of Jarrett Walker's work.[49][50]
Walker, Jarrett (2024). Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking About Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives (Revised ed.). Island Press. ISBN9781642833058.
^"Guest Lecture: Jarrett Walker presents "Transit: Freedom through Geometry" – UCLA Luskin". UCLA Luskin. Archived from the original on June 5, 2020. Retrieved June 5, 2020. Born in 1962, he grew up in Portland, Oregon during the revolutionary 1970s, the era when Portland first made its decisive commitment to be a city for people rather than cars. He went on to complete a BA at Pomona College (Claremont, California) and a Ph.D. in theatre arts and humanities at Stanford University. Passionately interested in an impractical number of fields, he is probably the only person with peer-reviewed publications in both the Journal of Transport Geography and Shakespeare Quarterly.
^Patricia Leigh Brown (August 2, 2015). "Bay Area's Disjointed Public Transit Network Inspires a Call for Harmony". The New York Times. Archived from the original on June 5, 2020. Retrieved June 4, 2020. Part of the problem is geography. At the Bay Area's heart "is an obstacle — the bay," said Jarrett Walker, a transportation planning and policy consultant who edits the blog HumanTransit.org and has written a book of the same title (Island Press, 2011). "There are three cities that with some justification regard themselves as important centers in their own right," he said, referring to San Francisco itself, Oakland, and San Jose. "People live 'over the hill' or 'across the water.' There's a weaker sense of region."
^Jeremy Hobson (February 23, 2015). "Redesigning Houston's METRO System Without Breaking The Bank". wbur.org. Archived from the original on June 5, 2020. Retrieved June 4, 2020. Here & Now's Jeremy Hobson speaks with one of the lead designers, Jarrett Walker, about what goes into redesigning a city's transit system.
^"Get Onboard: It's Time To Stop Hating The Bus". wbur.org. March 29, 2012. Archived from the original on June 5, 2020. Retrieved June 4, 2020. There's a transit consultant named Jarrett Walker who likes to tell drivers about the importance of frequency by saying imagine if you had a gate at the end of your driveway that only open every 15 minutes.
^ abWalker, Jarrett (October 31, 2018). "The Bus Is Still Best". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on June 4, 2020. Retrieved June 4, 2020. Visualize a low-density suburb, with requests scattered over a wide area. How many people's doors can a driver get to in an hour, including the minute or two that the customer spends grabbing their things and boarding? The intuitively obvious answer is the right one: not very many. An Eno Foundation report promoting microtransit could not cite a case study doing better than four boardings an hour of service. John Urgo, the planner of demand-responsive service for AC Transit in Oakland, California, has said that seven boardings an hour is "the best we hope to achieve." Few fixed-route buses perform that poorly. Across sprawling Silicon Valley, for example, fixed-route buses carried 12 to 45 people an hour in 2015. In a dense city such as Philadelphia, the number can exceed 80. I've found similar figures in all of the 50 or so transit agencies that I've studied over the years.
^Will Doig (March 3, 2012). "It's time to love the bus". Salon. Archived from the original on June 4, 2020. Retrieved June 4, 2020. And yet we rarely do. Streetcars are replacing bus routes in cities across the country, and billions are thrown at light rail while the overlooked bus is left to scream "Marsha, Marsha, Marsha!" "If you decide that buses don't merit investment, you're going to miss a lot of opportunities to help people get where they're going, and to expand their sense of freedom of movement, just because you don't like the vehicle they're riding," says transit consultant Jarrett Walker.
^Semuels, Alana (October 28, 2015). "Why People Don't Ride Public Transit in Small Cities". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on June 4, 2020. Retrieved June 4, 2020. In the 1970s, Portland was much like Nashville, Walker said, with parking lots and cars everywhere. But after the region introduced new laws preserving existing land, which limited road construction, Portland had to reassess. In the 1980s, the city redesigned its bus system, establishing lines along a grid that made service more frequent and widespread. After bus ridership increased, the region was able to muster the political will to put in light rail.
^Yonah Freemark (August 20, 2014). "A Call for Minimum Service Standards". The Transport Politic. Archived from the original on April 14, 2020. Retrieved June 4, 2020. As Jarrett Walker has noted many times, frequency of service can be just as important as speed since the frequency at which a vehicle on a line arrives determines how long most people have to wait — especially when they're transferring between services, an essential element of any big-city transit network and one that cannot be significantly improved with real-time data.
^Yonah Freemark (July 11, 2011). "Reorganizing the Bus System within the Network Hierarchy". The Transport Politic. Retrieved June 4, 2020. As Jarrett Walker noted, the poor frequencies offered by bus service on the cancelled route meant it was only quicker if the bus was there exactly when you needed it; more frequent services built on transfers will bring better transit for more people at all times of the day. And they mean better access to parts of the city not directly along the route of the local bus.
^E. Tammy Kim (May 30, 2019). "Opinion | How Uber Hopes to Profit From Public Transit". The New York Times. Archived from the original on June 30, 2020. Retrieved June 4, 2020. Jarrett Walker, a transit-design consultant, recently noted on the "Rideshare Guy" podcast that when Uber and Lyft divert relatively affluent riders from public transit, there's a damaging effect on "elite opinion." He added: "The notion among elites that, 'Well, Uber is the thing, because it's so convenient to me. Therefore, public transit should somehow become more like Uber.'"
^Emily Badger (April 9, 2020). "Transit Has Been Battered by Coronavirus. What's Ahead May Be Worse". The New York Times. Archived from the original on June 5, 2020. Retrieved June 4, 2020. It's not a business," said Jarrett Walker, a transit consultant. "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.
