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(click on image for larger version) Streetcar MKE Streetcar: Personal Blog

(click on image for larger version) image of The Hop streetcar at Bastille Days 2023

Four Years of Transit: by Foot, Rail, and Bus: Part I

by John December / Updates/More Info: johndecember.com/mke

Posted: 2024-04-22

Please see my caveats about my blog before reading this.

On March 10, 2024, I marked the fourth consecutive year of walking and using transit as my sole way to get around Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA. I started walking and riding public transit during the global pandemic in 2020. During that first year, I met my daily needs by walking and riding The Hop streetcar. In the second year, I added the use of buses and the Amtrak train for longer trips. In the third year, I continued to travel only by foot and transit and lived a full life. In this essay, I describe my experience of transit and walking for a fourth year.

Outline of This Essay

Part I: I Completed a Fourth Year of Using Transit and Walking As My Sole Mobility

Part I: I Completed a Fourth Year of Using Transit and Walking As My Sole Mobility

The global Covid-19 pandemic set off a jarring series of events that impacted everyone's lives in different ways. For me, I started the pandemic using my car-free tactics to take the trips I needed. I found that I could use only the streetcar and walking to go to the limited number of places open during early 2020, a period of masking, social distancing, and many closed public areas. Later, when these restrictions eased, I could continue my walking and transit use to reach a full range of destinations--groceries, shopping, restaurants, cafes, library visits, freelance work, photo walks, medical appointments, walks along the lake and riverwalk, attending concerts and plays, classes, and meeting family and friends. I described my patterns of walking and using transit in my previous years' blog entries.

This fourth year, I gained more insight into navigating my world without a car. By observing the activity along the streetcar route and the rebound in transit ridership, I saw ways that urban planning, development, and transit could better support each other.

This first part describes the continuing activity and development I saw along the streetcar route. The new buildings, the increasing presence of people downtown, and the rising numbers of people using transit revealed the connections among land use, development, and transit ridership.

The City and The Streetcar Continued Pandemic Recovery

The spring of 2023 ended a winter of snow but then began a period of warmth in April 2023 that developed into a hot summer. The winter of 2023-2024 was the warmest Wisconsin winter in 130 years. I saw both the city and The Hop continue to recover from the pandemic:

(click on image for larger version) collage illustration of development near the streetcar route (2024)

During this time, I experienced more of my neighborhood and city, snapped photos of The Hop Streetcar, read more about urbanism, and enjoyed more life emerging in the post-pandemic world.

Because I experienced life without a car for an extended time, I could see more clearly how car dependency is embedded in assumptions about how cities work. I could understand the viewpoint of those who depend on transit because that is how I have lived exclusively for these four years, and I have relied on public transit for decades. I have tried to understand those who feel they need to drive a car for almost every trip they take. I could see how a downtown area prioritizing people and places can make automobile access more difficult. I saw the challenges faced by the city where I live and the challenges of advocating for a less car-dependent and more transit-supporting community.

Development Along the Streetcar Route Continued

Throughout this time, I saw new construction and refurbishment of buildings along the streetcar route continue. The Couture at the lakefront and 333 N Water St reached skyward. NovaMKE reached completion. Each of these developments replaced a vacant lot or, in the case of The Couture, an empty bus depot that had been underutilized.

Here is a collage illustration of development and construction along the streetcar route:

(click on image for larger version) collage illustration of development near the streetcar route (2024)

I updated and expanded a separate file listing development on the streetcar route to track this construction, showing completed, under construction, and proposed development near the streetcar route. This file also cites research into the relationship between streetcars and development. In brief, this research shows:

This research indicates that the relationship between streetcars and development is catalytic and mutually reinforcing. It is not a causal relationship but complex, and likely more variables are involved. But the relationship this research reveals is that each component—development and streetcars—must meet its goals well and support and benefit from each other. The need for streetcars to operate well is so critical to the relationship of transit to land use that in Part III of this essay, I will outline a concept for helping the streetcar move along more rapidly on its route using Transit Signal Priority more accurately.

Note that many hundreds of buildings existed in the area before The Hop began service began in 2018--homes, office buildings, stores, apartments, condos, banks, art galleries, museums, government offices, financial services, restaurants, bars, cafes, and more--have benefitted from The Hop's transit service. I expect that these properties generate some incremental additional tax revenue for the city because of the boost in value to their property. Moreover, the land use benefits are not just for significant developments--each property can incrementally improve with the additional foot traffic and customers.

Historic Patterns of Growth in the City Revived

Milwaukee's first age of streetcars, as Canfield (1972) described, coincided with the city's rise in population and prosperity. This historic streetcar system supported the pre-automotive life of Milwaukee during its years of growth late in the 19th century and into the early to mid-twentieth century when various transit modes served people's needs (Gurda, 1999).

Milwaukee's early streetcar system demonstrated how well streetcars served people walking and moving about in neighborhoods in the heart of the city. Streetcars profoundly shaped Milwaukee's streets by carrying passengers to and from businesses and destinations along the streetcar routes. These early streetcars and the people who used them carved the walking and transit fabrics (Newman, Kosonen, & Kenworthy, 2016) of the early city that persist today in some areas. Alex Marshall, author of How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken (2001), points out the importance of having healthy walking and transit fabrics, as he states in his book, "having a real downtown, and, I would posit, having a sense of place at all, are not possible where the car reigns supreme" (p. 183).

The Hop streetcar returns the supportive fabrics for walking and transit to some of the same streets where it was set down by streetcars early in Milwaukee's history. The rise of development along The Hop's route in contemporary times reflects the effect of streetcars in a dynamic relationship with walkable urbanism and land use (Brooks and Lutz, 2019).

High-Visibility Development is Just Part of the Picture

While highly visible, tall buildings and more expensive housing are not the only types of land use along the streetcar route. Some might point to the new, tall buildings as "housing only for the rich," implying that it is the only type of building near the streetcar. However, that is not the full story. The affordable Michigan Street Commons have been built near the Hop's Intermodal Station, and the Convent Hill South tower has been proposed to augment the already-existing affordable Convent Hill apartments near The Hop's Ogden Jackson stops.

Affordable housing has existed in neighborhoods along the streetcar corridor in new and older buildings for decades, including rent-subsidized and organically affordable housing. Many apartments were constructed before automobile dominance of the streets and before zoning destroyed the opportunity to construct buildings offering many smaller units without parking. Many affordable apartments were constructed during the widespread use of streetcars in the city because people could travel to city destinations easily without owning a car.

This mix of expensive and inexpensive units in the same neighborhood provides housing for people from all life stages and employment--workers at nearby grocery stores or restaurants, students, new professionals, at-home remote workers, and housing for retired people. A mix of housing types for a range of incomes, all blended together in neighborhoods, is healthy for a city because it expands the choices people can make at different times of their lives and yet remain in the same neighborhood.

People raise serious concerns about segregation and displacement in the face of development and neighborhood improvement. The City of Milwaukee Department of City Development released "A Place in the Neighborhood: An Anti-Displacement Plan for Neighborhoods Surrounding Downtown Milwaukee" to address issues of segregation, historical disparities, including redlining, and hyperlocal real estate markets. Further, a Milwaukee Community Land Trust provides affordable housing in perpetuity as a way to anchor a community. The Community Development Alliance works to make housing that is affordable. The Milwaukee Housing Trust Fund has worked since 2007, through grants and loans, to rehabilitate and make accessible affordable housing. According to the City of Milwaukee, "More than half of the Housing Trust Fund's project allocations have gone toward housing for the homeless, making up more than half of the units produced to date."

Accusations of gentrification often follow the improvement of a neighborhood. While concerns about displacement and fairness in housing and access are vital, I favor neighborhood improvement, even if it does not benefit me directly. For example, I gladly accept in my neighborhood The Ascent apartments to replace the site of a former pizza restaurant, which had sat vacant for over a decade as a crumbling structure attracting blight and vandalism. I will gladly live in an improving neighborhood, with new development providing stability and repelling blight--versus the alternative. At the same time, I know that my affordable housing depends on expanding the overall housing supply--at all income levels--in the face of increased demand.

Some claims of gentrification often focus on a narrow range of effects while ignoring the whole picture. In Alan Mallach's book, The Divided City (2018), he tells the story of the rise and fall of the American industrial city. He describes how gentrification accusations in improving areas can deflect from recognizing decline in other areas. He examined census tracts in Indianapolis (pp. 123-124) to see where household income and house values have increased. He found five census tracts where both measures had increased "significantly faster than citywide" (p. 123). Then, Mallach "flipped the measures" and looked instead at low or middle-income areas (up to 120% of regional median income) and searched for a decline in house value and income measures over the same period. Sixty tracts matched this criteria, with declines between 2000 and 2014. He observes: "And yet, while only a small pocket of the city close to downtown is gentrifying, nearly a third of the city's neighborhoods are trending downward, with families becoming poorer and housing losing value." (p. 124).

Alan Mallach's point is that while the areas of improving neighborhoods draw the very focused and vocal accusations of gentrification, these same voices are mainly silent about the other areas of the city that are declining. No evidence supports the effectiveness of stopping improvements in one neighborhood to reverse another neighborhood's decline. Mallach bemoans the "gallons of real and virtual ink spilled on the subject of gentrification" and the "...worrisome disconnect between the reality of our cities and the rhetoric flowing from them." (p. 142). Mallach quotes the Detroit activist Lauren Hood, who said the "'G' word is kind of a distraction." (p. 142). Claims of gentrification, however, can be used to suppress additional housing supply precisely where it is in the most demand and distract from creating housing that is affordable where it is needed the most.

Although it does not attract the ire of the word "gentrification," a much more serious threat to affordability involves the opposition that prevents new housing from forming. In districts that are so highly desirable that the prices are beyond the reach of most people, owners seek to preserve housing scarcity. Richard Florida, in The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class-and What We Can Do About It (2017), describes issues of neighborhood unaffordability as "revolv[ing] around the urban land nexus: land is scarce precisely where it is needed the most." (p. 191). Wealthy people in desirable neighborhoods form an able political force that can use any means necessary to prevent development, including affordable housing, transit access, rental apartments, or anything that disturbs their unique "neighborhood character." Florida advises updating zoning, planning, and building codes to stop the power of what he calls New Urban Luddites to dictate land use. M. Nolan Gray describes the devastating effects of zoning in Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It (2022).

Opposition to new development or building may hide an anti-competitive agenda. For example, I have seen that existing building owners will react firmly and negatively to a proposal to construct a building near their properties. This anti-competitive tactic will take the form of condemnation and negative comments about the new project without disclosing the competitive economic self-interest or the residence area of the person commenting. (For example, someone who lives in the suburbs condems an in-city development.) The end goal of this anti-competitive tactic is to limit the available housing supply. The legality of this anti-competitive pressure is questionable. It can be part of the hidden root cause behind claims of congestion, neighborhood character change, or even criticism of the appearance of the proposed development. All city zoning codes, board meetings, and approval processes must recognize that existing building owners, condo owners, house owners, or financially involved parties--even those who live in areas remote from a proposed development--have a substantial economic interest in limiting the supply of housing or even developable land. Public comment and approval processes must guard against this anti-competitive influence.

The process must also guard against misconceptions. Some people seem confused about how private investment in development works and may think the city government is "putting in" tall buildings with public money. There are publicly-funded affordable housing developments and buildings that get public grants or tax breaks. However, many projects are entirely private market efforts--people investing a considerable amount of money to construct a building, but only after careful market analysis and willingness to take on the risks in anticipation of a return on the investment. The approval process must identify public money, if used, but not reject market-driven private investment because of public confusion about the financing and the nature of the risk.

Some people seem ambivalent about the role of development and tall buildings in cities or seem sour on any "modern architecture" (actually, a misnomer). They seem to worry about the shadows tall buildings might cast. Shadows play a role in the dynamics of an urban landscape (Whyte, 1988), but shadows are the inevitable product of the turning of the earth on its axis. Contemporary architecture is open to interpretation and criticism, but when done well, great buildings are indeed a work of engineering and art together. Most importantly, affordable, practical buildings constructed in a free market may not be able to provide, at the cost point of the market, advanced architectural design.

In the end, some people may prefer low-density living—and that is fine—but it makes no sense to impose a low-density standard on urban areas, particularly in cities where density is essential to serving people well. Options for low-density living abound in the massive land area of the state of Wisconsin--people have many choices for suburban, exurban, and rural places to live. Downtown Milwaukee constitutes about 0.00384% of the land area of the state of Wisconsin. This tiny fraction of the state's land area, at the population heart of the metropolitan area, should be an uncontested and appropriate place for tall buildings. In other words, urbanism should be an option among many, and the author Christopher B. Leinberger makes the case in his book, The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream (2008). Tall buildings are not the entirety of a city and certainly not even a small fraction of a metropolitan area's land use. Most successful cities have a very wide range of building sizes and types, and I think everything from starter homes, single family homes, micro apartments, condos, townhomes, and everything all the way up to skyscrapers should be part of that range.

As the state's largest city, Milwaukee serves as the setting for the tallest buildings in the state for a reason: its land is at a valuable nexus for business, industry, commerce, education, finance, innovation, advanced manufacturing, travel, tourism, and living. Milwaukee's land is sometimes described as "landlocked" (because it borders Lake Michigan to the east and the borders of suburbs west, north, and south). Inevitably, this limited horizontal extension leads to the value of upward development. Milwaukee's roots and identity are in the idea of a gathering place and "the good land" that has been in its location for millennia and cultivated by the Native Peoples of the land for centuries (The Encyclopedia of Milwaukee, "Native Milwaukee"). The conduct of human civilization has been in building, rebuilding, and re-imagining cities (Reader, 2004). Buildings and development are consistent with millennia of human efforts for habitation and commerce at the nexus of a community that meets human needs well.

Tall buildings represent architecture that expresses life and aesthetics, skilled engineering, construction, economic achievement, and environmental benefits. Cities that are well-built for people, incrementally built with sound business practices, and supported by walkable urbanism, active transit, and public transit are ideal homes for environmental heroes.

Development Supports Environmental, Prosperity, and Economic Goals

While a highly visible component of development, tall buildings take up just a small fraction of the land yet represent a significant impact on the economic activity of the city. Mid-rise and other buildings over 30 meters tall also play a role in the urban landscape, and incremental development at a small scale promises to spur improvements in neighborhoods. However, proposals for tall buildings seem to bring out skeptics of urbanism. Tall buildings reflect land value and provide benefits by translating that land value into residences, offices, commercial activities, retail, destinations, and jobs. Tall buildings are not an end in themselves, and not the only component of a healthy urban landscape, but when placed and designed well, tall buildings do triple duty by: (1) making the best environmental use of scarce urban land, (2) powering economic activity and compact, walkable urbanism, particularly when paired with transit-oriented development, and (3) generating revenue supportive of the entire city.

Tall buildings can be an environmentally sound component of city development. As David Owen describes in Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability (2009), urban development patterns, including taller buildings and density, are green because of the resulting compact footprint on the environment. People commonly misunderstand the value tall buildings make possible: a limited footprint of economic value on scarce urban land. When cities reject tall buildings, low-density suburban sprawl spreads within and outside their borders. This suburban sprawl is the unfortunate theme of much of 20th and 21st-century urban history.

Tall buildings contribute to the density that leads to the collaborative sparks creating prosperity in a modern urban economy (Shearer, Vey, & Kim, 2019; Ahlfeldt & Pietrostefani, 2019; Norquist, 1998; Colin Buchanan and Partners, 2008; Gordon & Whitehead, 2016). In Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (2011), Edward L. Glaeser advocates for the city as the way toward health, wealth, and prosperity. Glaeser echoes Owen, observing that the "alleged environmentalists who suffer from the Lorax fallacy and fight high-density development close to urban cores to preserve local green spaces are ensuring that development will move to the exurban fringe and that people will drive more" (p. 221).

The misunderstanding of the historical role of cities (Reader, 2004) came up again during the pandemic with the assumption that technology (the Internet, global telecommunications) obliterates the need for face-to-face contact. This prediction of the online world removing the need for human contact has never come to be. Online communication has never made cities obsolete, but the opposite: cities as a site for in-person contact are more valuable than ever, particularly for creative, productive people to collaborate and build relationships and trust. Human beings have depended on face-to-face contact for over 200,000 years. While online communication remains a vital part of the contemporary world and a driver of productivity, commerce, culture, and entertainment, the metaverse as a replacement for real life has not seemed to draw a large number of eager inhabitants. The pandemic revealed that some aspects of the virtual world can be an unsatisfying misuse of time.

Central business districts throughout the world and history demonstrate how a portion of a city can be built incrementally to support activities that tap the value of that location. For people who drive nearly everywhere, the walkable proximity that taller buildings create among city features may be lost on them because their use of cars erases their awareness of walkability and its value. People who drive nearly everywhere see green expanses along the highway through their electric car's windshield as they drive back and forth from the suburbs, and this--they think--makes them "green."

Suburban sprawl destroys wildlife habitats, watersheds, and essential agricultural land that can never be replaced. Suburban sprawl also dramatically increases the distances needed to travel, increases the construction, maintenance, and repeated expansion costs of roadways needed to connect low-density buildings, and eliminates the efficiency of mass transit. The use of automobiles damages our environment, health, and social systems (Miner et al., 2024). People who drive nearly everywhere might consider themselves environmentalists, but their perspective is often clouded, as Owen (2009) points out, by a false sense that low-density, car-dependent sprawl is always the best "green" human habitation when the opposite is true for large cities.

Transportation and Land Use Are Intertwined

The construction of taller buildings along the streetcar route and nearby is ongoing.

The most notable advance in The Hop streetcar's route was under final construction during 2023-2024. The completion of The Couture apartment tower was essential for The Hop to operate, as its base contained the transit concourse (Lakefront Station) containing the streetcar track for the streetcar L-Line extension (Bauman, 2022). After some delay involving challenges related to The Couture, construction got underway in May 2021. Construction proceeded for nearly three years for The Couture, a 44-story apartment building, 537 feet, 163.6 meters tall. At its completion, it is the tallest residential building in Wisconsin.

The base of The Couture building contains a transit concourse for both The Hop and the Milwaukee County Transit Service Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) Connect 1 bus line. This transit station replaces a prior bus transit building that was underutilized. The Couture building is expected to include retail space on the first four floors, including restaurants. The opening of the Lakefront Station in April 2024 (Becwar, 2024) established three more streetcar stations (Michigan at Jackson, Lakefront, and Clybourn at Jefferson) for riders to access in the heart of the business district and within walking distance of lakefront museums, parks, and festival grounds.

This continuing development is the story of the city itself--a work-in-progress, a work of imagination made real in the form of buildings, infrastructure, and transportation options. It is the story of a city working with all the resources and talented people it can bring together, striving to build life, vitality, and prosperity for the city.

Transit Ridership Dropped, Then Recovered with Activity

The covid-19 global pandemic disrupted all human activity on earth profoundly starting in 2020 (Onyeaka, 2021; CDC, 2024). Many public gathering places closed down. Restaurants closed dining rooms, but some offered curbside service.

The initial shock of the pandemic led to shutdowns of activities involving public gatherings and many workplaces, resulting in fewer destinations open. Because there were fewer places to go, a collapse in transit use worldwide followed. Transit agencies scrambled to implement ridership protocols such as masking and social distancing (Donggyun et al., 2021; Wilbur, 2023). While it was initially uncertain what the effect of the virus on transit would be, preliminary studies showed that transit was safe to use (Schwartz, 2020).

In the longer term, transit agencies developed protocols that are still under study (Onyeaka, 2021). The Hop streetcar, like transit worldwide, implemented protocols for masking and social distancing and even utilizing the streetcar itself to provide public health messaging about masking.

Transit Ridership Collapsed at the Pandemic's Start

While the pandemic was an astonishing event in human history, the effect on transit system ridership should have been no surprise at all. The foundation of transit study involves understanding the role of trip generators and trip attractors, and this is textbook knowledge (Rodrigue et al., 2020; Woldeamanuel, 2016). The pandemic introduced, as if in some giant science experiment, what would happen if the reasons for people to travel and places to go (trip generators and attractors) were removed from transit systems. The effect of this unprecedented worldwide event then showed how transit ridership decreased dramatically.

The following chart shows the collapse and gradual recovery in ridership of specific transit systems, starting dramatically in early 2020 compared to 2019. The year 2019 is the last full pre-pandemic year for transit ridership. The chart compares monthly boardings along the timeline to the corresponding month in 2019 and shows the percentage change in boardings. In this chart, the agencies listed are The Hop streetcar (HOP), US Light Rail category (LRT), US Public Transit as a whole (TRANSIT), US Bus Transit as a whole (BUS), Milwaukee County Transit System (MCTS), and The San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART).

(click on image for larger version) chart showing ridership on selected transit systems (2024)


SOURCE: https://www.apta.com, https://www.thehopmke.com/ridership, https://johndecember.com

Systems began at the cliff's edge of ridership in February 2020, and boardings dropped dramatically in March and April that year. Researchers (Ziedan et al., 2023) found that "overall transit ridership hit a 100-year low in 2020." With fewer destinations open and people staying at home or working from home, public transit usage changed. Many people still needed to get to their jobs, and this formed a core of the pandemic public transit riders.

Researchers (Qi et al., 2021) also found that a group stuck with transit: "the areas with a higher percentage of the population in poverty and a higher percentage of the Hispanic population are more likely to experience smaller reductions in public transit ridership." Those who had limited options faced "exacerbated existing transportation burdens for those who have limited mobility options." (He et al., 2022). In contrast, researchers found "the areas with higher median household income, a higher percentage of the population with a Bachelor's degree or higher, higher employment rate, and a higher percentage of the Asian population are more likely to have more reductions in public transit ridership during the COVID-19 pandemic." (Qi et al., 2021).

People reduced or stopped using public transit due to the shutdown of many destinations—they had few places to go. Many other people continued taking transit because they had to get to work. Some workers and people could stay home and not take public transit. For others who had to get to work, they remained public transit riders, even in the face of reduced service and masking protocols.

A system such as BART had more business workers who could immediately switch to remote work. In all cases, the transit system's interaction with the city's activity set the pace of change. Significant influences, such as changes in urban geography, land use, transit funding, transit shutdown rules, and transit system design or operation, also play a role. Studying all these issues may shed some light on how transit operates through a pandemic and the larger picture of how transit depends on active cities.

Transit Ridership Echoed Office Occupancy

We can look at a chart of office occupancy in the downtowns of major US Metropolitan areas to see a corresponding pattern of a dramatic dip and then recovery:

(click on image for larger version) chart showing office occupancy (2024)


SOURCE: https://www.kastle.com/safety-wellness/getting-america-back-to-work/

This pattern of office occupancy follows closely, in pace and shape, to the previous chart of transit ridership decline through the pandemic and recovery afterward. Although office occupancy is certainly not the whole trip attractor for transit ridership, this similarity in shape and pace between these charts is remarkable. This similarity suggests that office occupancy might be a good proxy for the overall strength of trip attractors for transit. Further, this similarity should inform those people who criticize the reduction of ridership through the pandemic and fail to see that the ridership decline was part of a bigger picture of the decline of transit demand.

The Business Improvement District (BID) Downtown Milwaukee prepared this chart showing the pace of workers returning to the office during pandemic recovery:

(click on image for larger version) chart showing Milwaukee office occupancy during the pandemic


SOURCE: https://www.milwaukeedowntown.com

The pace and similarity of these charts of office return and transit ridership recovery should come as no surprise because of the fundamentals of the relationship between transit and land use predicted by transit analysts (Rodrigue et al., 2020; Woldeamanuel, 2016; Spieler, 2018). The significance to our time is that never before in human history has such a closure of destinations taken place worldwide to show the strength of this relationship.

Some people ideologically oppose public transit and have sought to misinterpret this ridership loss as people "losing interest" in transit. However, the decline in transit ridership resulted from having few places to go during the pandemic because of the shutdown of activities. Following the dramatic drop in ridership, a slow but rising recovery of transit use followed as destinations opened. When there are places to go and a way to access those places using transit, people use transit--an "obvious" relationship, but the fine points of what this means seem routinely ignored in discussions, analysis, and planning transit.

There is a dynamic relationship between transit and the post-pandemic recovery of downtowns. The Brookings report, "Ensuring the intertwined post-pandemic recoveries of downtowns and transit systems" (Rowlands & Hadden Loh, 2023), documents the pandemic's effects on downtown activities in relationship to transit systems. The significant finding of this report is that "Downtowns and transit still represent a mutually beneficial relationship"--even after the pandemic. The Brookings report observes, "Dense, multi-use downtowns anchor transit ridership at a metro area level by generating a large number of trips (both commutes and non-commutes) to a small area—the sort of demand that fixed-route transit serves best." The recommendations for transit include focusing on connecting activity centers and establishing the "dedicated, long-term funding mechanisms tied to the economic and environmental value that transit systems help create." The Brooking's report describes the value of transit-oriented development, transit reliability, transit frequency, and the support of "clockface scheduling," where transit routes have specified headway intervals. (I observed the value of this clockface scheduling during the pandemic when The Hop used its 20-minute headway schedules every day.)

The nature of work changed during the pandemic, but remote work has not overtaken in-office work. Forbes Advisor provides coverage of US work patterns in "Remote Work Statistics And Trends." These findings show that in 2024, the at-home workforce is at 12.7%, while hybrid (working at home sometimes and in-office sometimes) has reached 28.2%. At the same time, those who work entirely in-office represent 59.1% of the workforce. The Forbes coverage observes, "This [in-office worker] percentage underscores the fact that while remote work is on an upswing, traditional in-office work is far from obsolete."

Transit and Land Use are Connected

Development and activities along a transit route intertwine with transit use. These relationships are precisely what the literature about streetcars and development describes. Transit textbooks tell us that, to have large numbers of people using transit, you must identify the places where people originate and places for people to go and create transit modes connecting those places (Rodrigue et al., 2020; Woldeamanuel, 2016; Spieler, 2018).

Since the earliest history of vehicle use for transportation, observations have shown that transit follows daily patterns of use--peaks and valleys of ridership numbers. These patterns are also apparent in automobile traffic patterns and many human daily activities. We can see freeways showing crowded traffic at rush hour or nearly empty roadways at many other times of the day. We can see a Sunday morning suburban street with very few cars and highways early in the morning on Sunday with few drivers. It should come as no surprise that transit displays these same patterns.

"When Milwaukee is Busy, The Hop is Busy"

When I have taken photos of the streetcar, I could see that when there were festivals and other gatherings in the city, particularly in the Third Ward and Cathedral Square, The Hop was busy with riders. I use the phrase, "When Milwaukee is busy, The Hop is busy," because it reflects something far more subtle than the often polarized debate about the role of transit in cities: it reflects the relationship between ridership and land use. Simply put, activity drives ridership. Too often, transit critics or the general public view transit without the context of activity on land proximate to transit. Streetcars can support this activity by delivering passengers right to the point of activity (for example, Cathedral Square, the Public Market, or the Lakefront Station). This ability of the streetcar to bring passengers to activity areas can reduce the demand for automobile access and the demand for space to be given over to parking. Excessive parking or unenforced parking laws damage the best use of space in cities (Shoup, 2011; Shoup, 2018). Streetcars allow more space for activities, people, and places, which drives the city's vibrancy.

Transit planning must focus on how land use can contribute to transit's success. Transit serves well when it can provide service to alleviate the demand for automobile trips into an area. Free, underpriced, or illegal parking reduces transit's value. During peak demand periods, such as festivals or other events, the streetcar can serve many people and provide an alternative to cars flooding an area. As a part of city transportation infrastructure, The Hop shines during these times of extensive activities. At other times, the day-to-day ridership levels follow workday patterns and evening rides to events and activities in the city. But in all cases, when there is something to do and places to be, The Hop is busy. Ultimately, the success of The Hop depends on the success of the city of Milwaukee itself in offering an active environment with land being used productively on a regular basis rather than locked up in parking lots or parking garages.

Land Use and Transit Should be Planned, Designed, Built, and Operated in Concert
Transit critics and supporters can avoid talking past each other by recognizing what transit is and what it takes to allow it to succeed.

Charles Marohn, in his book Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town, identifies public transit as a "wealth-building multiplier" when done correctly (p. 147). However, the disconnect is that anti-transit and pro-transit advocates often speak past each other (p. 156). Marohn does see a role for transit and unequivocally asserts: "The proper role of transit is as a wealth accelerator for local communities." (p. 156). More specifically, transit overcomes the geometry of streets by alleviating the need to store cars at destinations and augments the "success of human congestion" (p. 158). Notably, Marohn questions why "Enormous sums are spent on transportation infrastructure, yet next to nothing is spent connecting transit stops to the community." (p. 147). He observes this around the Springfield, Massachusetts, train station. He states: "Instead of marrying people and place, it is as if designers of the transit system focus only on the actual transportation device, not the experience of the rider and not the quality of the place being served." (p. 147).

In her book Shifting Gears: Toward a New Way of Thinking about Transportation, Susan Handy points to the same missing piece of transit planning: land use. Her book covers the shifting assumptions about transit. In her chapter on mobility, she observes that while mobility and accessibility have traditionally worked as competing goals, the focus on mobility has been the primary emphasis of rationalist approaches of transportation planners (p. 73). However, the shift has been toward accessibility (p. 79).

Handy's Ph.D. dissertation focused on accessibility, and she unwinds the conflict between mobility and access by explaining how neighborhoods work. A neighborhood works by people being able to meet their needs by traveling a certain amount of time. If people can travel by foot or bicycle (or a combination) for up to five or fifteen minutes to meet their needs, this defines a "five-minute" or "fifteen-minute" neighborhood (p. 86). This time-defined neighborhood ideally places key destinations (grocery, work, medical, education, recreation, entertainment, civic, parks, and other essentials) within these distances defined by time using a travel mode. If someone uses walking, bicycling, or public transit to reach close destinations, they may have slower point-to-point speeds than a private automobile. However, they could still complete their trip in a reasonable time. It might even be that these closer distances could require less travel time than if a car would be used to reach a destination much further away, even with a slower mode of travel. Moreover, active and public transit can provide healthy exercise in passengers' schedules. Handy notes that many transportation planners do not study land use or pay attention to access; hence, this accessibility work is often a blind spot in the transportation field.

Other transit observers have made the same point: Land use around transit stations, often ignored, represents a curious disconnect when planning transit. In his book, Trains, Buses, People: An Opinionated Atlas of US Transit, Christof Spieler outlines 47 streetcar and Bus Rapid Transit systems and forms a simple but essential thesis: In order to be successful, transit needs to be placed where people are. He states: "To build good public transit... we need to focus on the quality of service, not the technology that delivers it; to talk about all kinds of transit riders, not just about a narrow target market; to understand that the transit experience depends on buildings and streets and sidewalks as much as it does on stations and trains; and, above all, to talk about getting transit in the right places." (p. 1).

In The Lost Subways of North America: A Cartographic Guide to the Past, Present, and What Might Have Been, Jake Berman traces North American transit from pre-automotive modes to the rapid adoption of early rail technologies. He profiles 23 transit systems and the unique stories of the many forces that formed them. The early era of rail marked the rise of vibrant cities where walking and transit fabrics became etched into urban cores, as happened in Milwaukee (Canfield, 1972). The age of multimodal urban mobility ended with the introduction and exclusive promotion of the automobile as the apex of transportation (Norton, 2008).

Berman observes how transit and land use, when treated separately, lead to disappointing underperformance for both. Berman's point is that transit success depends on recognizing the strength of transit's relationship to land use and how clarity of vision, leadership, and ambition are all required to build and manage metropolitan-scale infrastructure projects. Berman's final paragraph summarizes the main lesson of his book: "North America's mass transit and land use problems can be tackled, but it will entail emulating international best practices and learning from past mistakes." (p. 242).

This separation of considering transit and land use together also appears from the viewpoint of land use planning. New Urbanist approaches often make no mention of public transit and seem to focus only on the design of places and walkable urbanism--but fail in connecting neighborhoods together with appropriate transit modes. A metropolitan planning organization (MPO), The Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission, fails to envision public transit as a service that helps everyone at all income levels and stages in life and instead describes transit only in terms of serving the poor or uneducated. This lack of attention to the fuller picture of how transit and land use can work together for everyone leads to a tremendous loss of opportunities to increase health, equity, livability, and prosperity for everyone in neighborhoods and the metropolitan area.

Critics of public transit spin the ridership decline of the pandemic as proof that "no one" will ride transit and ignore the relationship between active land use and transit. Supporters claim that people ride transit and point to vehicles and the popularity of rail, bus rapid transit service, and other transit systems used worldwide. Both viewpoints miss the crucial point: transit and land use operate together, along with walking accommodation and easy access to destinations within transit station walksheds. Simply put, the interaction of transit and land use sets up transit for either success or failure. Special promotions or commuter encouragement programs and seasonal events do not lead to transit success as much as the daily basics of helping people, where they are in numbers, every day, travel from one active destination to another using a transit link (Spieler, 2018; Marohn, 2021).

Transit's Value Must be Recognized
Much opposition to public transit depends on an automobile-oriented viewpoint nurtured for over a century. Peter Norton documents the rise of motordom in Fighting Traffic (2008) and shows how the space of the street, while a place for a mix of travel modes early in the 20th century, became dedicated to car travel nearly exclusively well before the 20th century's end. Charles Marohn reveals how an automobile-centric ideology embedded itself in the engineering profession in Confessions of a Recovering Engineer (2021).

In her book Shifting Gears (2023), Susan Handy shows shifting assumptions about transportation in nine core ideas covering Freedom, Speed, Mobility, Vehicles, Capacity, Hierarchy, Separation, Control, and Technology. She reveals how we can untangle outdated assumptions to gain "a transportation system that works better for everyone in all respects" (p. 237).

Other researchers have looked at how car bias often occludes the value of transit. Researchers Ian Walker, Alan Tapp, and Adrian Davis describe a measure of automobile bias in "Motonormativity: How Social Norms Hide a Major Public Health Hazard" (Walker et al., 2022). Other researchers have systematically reviewed the global impact of harm to the public and environmental health of automobile use (Miner et al., 2024). These advances in research and thought re-examine the automobile as the presumptive best choice for urban transportation.

I believe that public transit arises from the idea that a community of sufficient size requires, for the full participation of all its citizens, a transit infrastructure to support mobility. Todd Litman writes in defense of public transit in "Responding to Public Transit Criticism" (2024). Litman extolls public transit's benefits in "Evaluating public transit benefits and costs: best practices guidebook" and the value of rail transit in "Rail Transit In America: A Comprehensive Evaluation of Benefits".

The defense of public transit recognizes the value of each transit mode--from active transit (walking, bicycling) to bus (many different kinds) and intraurban and interurban rail (each of many different kinds) in providing mobility. I point out the example of Helsinki, Finland as a metropolitan area supporting many different transit modes in my second-year essay. Another key to improving public transit is to gain the perspective of people who are not car-dependent by involving car-free people in planning and decision-making processes. Relying only on car-dependent decision-makers, engineers, and planners who may consciously or unconsciously make small and large decisions in favor of car travel can introduce severe health and environmental hazards to the community (Walker et al., 2022).

I see The Hop streetcar reinforcing the value of public transportation through its unique fixed-rail advantages, which bring out and support productive land use and development along the route. Because of the synergistic relationship between streetcars and development, this can, in turn, draw more people to use the streetcar. In addition to the development goals, The Hop supports the goals for health, equity, livability, and prosperity for the community.

The success of transit depends on the land around transit stops. For transit to connect people and places, the strengths of each travel mode, transit vehicle, and station design must work to the best advantage. Along the streetcar route, opportunities to transform underutilized urban land into more productive uses await--many in the form of surface parking lots and parking garages. The streetcar provides a transit mode that works with the geometry of downtown streets, the walking and transit fabrics of the city, and the neighborhoods built among early streetcar tracks. The Hop makes it possible for people to work and live together more closely and collaborate beyond just online communication but in the face-to-face ways our contemporary economy values.

It took a global pandemic to reinforce the relationship of transit to land use. This is somewhat ironic since this knowledge was inherent in the operations and the study of transit for decades. Perhaps this relationship was considered so "obvious" that it was ignored or subsumed in politically charged debates. Professional silos of work on either transit or land use created a wall between them.

Connecting transit and land use allows us to build cities that make the best use of urban land and help people reach life-supporting resources and activities. As dramatically demonstrated during the pandemic, land use and transit share a profound interdependence, and this might be one of the pandemic's most enduring lessons.

In the next part, I will cover my experience living in the city and using walking and transit to meet my needs in a complete neighborhood.

To be continued:

Part II: I Experienced a Complete Neighborhood

Part III: I Conclude That Shifts in Urbanism Point to the Value of Transit and Streetcars

References
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2025-03-04 · John December · Terms © johndecember.com