Transportation Two-Step

Recently, I explored Austin’s transportation options beyond my customary round-trip, tracing a triangle between three major points — Central Austin, East Austin, and South Congress.

Transportation Two-Step Triangle Across Austin

I have written before about the need to plan ahead when choosing bus service to move around Austin — because frequency varies greatly from one route to the next; and, traveling by bus can be frustrating if the bus route is ahead or behind schedule (Capital Metro does not broadcast a live feed of buses’ locations).

A more complex itinerary requires both planning and flexibility, so that you are prepared to jump from one transportation option to the next if you miss a connection. For example I played a bit of Russian roulette with Car2Go. I took the bus to South Congress, betting that I would find a Car2Go there that could take me the final leg to my friend’s house, which is located in a residential neighborhood. I then bet with myself that the car would still be there after dinner to drive home. Luckily, it was. But, I lined up a ride home as plan B, just in case.

Even though I was ready for the day’s “transportation two-step,” I still ran into the customary gaps in service — like the 15 minutes I waited at 6th and Congress for my connection to the South Congress neighborhood. But, on the plus side, I discovered some new things:

• On my way to dinner, I picked up wine for the first time at a wine store, East End Wines, near my coworking space, Conjunctured.  

East End Wines

• My walk took me past the Texas State Cemetery and, for the first time, I really looked at it. When you drive by at 30-40 mph, it is hard to see how beautiful it is. Now I can’t wait to return to explore it.  

Texas State Cemetery

• I also discovered a purple flower I had never seen before growing across the street from the cemetery. I have since learned that it is called Passiflora “Incense” and that it is a great plant to include in a butterfly garden.

Passiflora "Incense"

• Rather than returning home after work or driving directly to my dinner engagement, I took advantage of the irregular bus schedule to spend an hour decompressing on the Hotel San José patio. It’s also a great place for people watching. Every time I visit, I see someone interesting. This time, it was a college-age guy dressed in rolled up white shorts and a rainbow colored bathrobe.

Patio at Hotel San José

All in all, I found that the combination of planning, a flexible attitude, and a little luck turned a complicated, multi-leg trip from an ordeal into a day of reduced stress (thanks to the Hotel San José) punctuated by discoveries along the way.

New City, New Routine (Part 2 of 2)

When I started spending half of my time in Houston, the following list of questions helped me move beyond its stereotype as the quintessential driving city to identify the options for reducing my dependency on the family car:

1. Where are you now, and where are you going? In an expansive city like Houston, this question is fundamental. If you are considering joining a carpool to commute to and from work, but your office’s location requires a car to attend meetings or go to lunch, a carpool may not work for you. In my case, my home in Houston is too far from my office to consider using alternative transportation for my daily commute. On the other hand, my office is located in Rice Village, a dense, mixed-use retail center. So, once I arrive, I can walk anywhere I need to go.    
2. What modes of transportation are available, convenient, and safe? Houston’s options for alternative transportation are relatively limited, although expanding. 

• Walking is an option in some neighborhoods, but the city is so spread out that it is not viable as a primary mode of transportation.
• The bus system, Metro, is making efforts to court new users through the light rail system. And, a public-private partnership recently launched a free bus route downtown called the Greenlink. However, the overall system continues to suffer from a public perception of inefficiency and inconvenience.
• Houston’s car share options are limited to “by the hour” rental cars and companies like Relay Rides whose members share their personal cars with each other. 
• On the other hand, it offers public access to more electric vehicle charging stations than many U.S. cities.
• The City recently launched a bike share program downtown. But, its scope is so small that it is only convenient for people who live and/or work downtown. 
• All in all, cycling appears to be the best choice in the city core, because it allows longer travel distances than walking, and it is more convenient (and, possibly, safer) than taking the bus. The only down side to cycling is the low percentage of streets with dedicated bike lanes. However, the Houston Bikeway program is slowly enhancing the cycling infrastructure.
3. What kind of transportation are other people using? Whether walking, cycling, or taking the bus, increasing the number of users often results in increased safety—both in terms of reducing car collisions and reducing the risk of crime. 
4. How much time, money, and effort are you willing to invest in an alternative mode of transportation? The answer to this question will vary from city to city and from person to person. Based on my responses to the above questions, my best options for reducing car dependence in Houston include: 
• living and working in areas of town that offer safe options for walking and cycling and a safe link between the two; 
• walking to services and amenities that are close to home and work; 
• cycling during the day to destinations that are slightly farther away; and, 
• using a combination of cycling and the light rail to travel to and from downtown. 

In order to meet these criteria, I would need to move closer into the city core, and I would need regular access to a bike. Neither of these requirements are realistic investments at the moment. So, for the time being, I have limited my attempts to reduce car dependence in Houston to taking advantage of the walkable nature of my office’s location.

In spite of the fact that I haven’t been able to meet my original goal of dramatically reducing car dependency in Houston, these four questions have given me a better understanding of what options are available today—and what might become available in the future. This exercise has also prompted me to start looking more seriously at the cycling infrastructure in Austin to see how it might fit into the mix of transportation options I use in that city.

Try using these questions where you live and travel. And, let me know if they helped you identify new ways of moving around the city, or if they just reaffirmed your initial assumptions. 

New City, New Routine (Part 1 of 2)

Cars are so dominant in the American transportation landscape—with a few exceptions such as Boston, New York, and San Francisco—that it can be daunting to seek alternatives.  Most of us are also creatures of habit. So, once we find a mode of transportation that suits our daily routine, we tend to use it for all of our trips, even if another mode of transportation would be more convenient.

I am just as much a creature of routine as the next person. And, while it has taken me a few months to develop a system that allows me to move around Austin with minimal reliance on our family car, I have realized that I self-limit my transportation options to an either/or question:

Should I take the bus?

   

Or, should I take Car2Go?

I was recently shaken out of this rhythm, however, by moving part-time to Houston, which is more than twice the size of Austin in terms of both population and land area.

Source: Google Maps

As I considered the best way to move around there, I was faced with a quandary: How could I continue to reduce my car dependency in such a different city?

In the second installment of this blog post, I will outline the questions that helped me evaluate my options.

Tracking My Trips: July 2012

The results from the second month tracking my daily travel are in.

In July, I spent 10 days in the Baltimore/DC metro area, 10 days in Austin, and 10 days in Houston — three metropolitan areas with very different transportation mixes. I was surprised to see that, in spite of spending 1/3 of the month in Houston (a city that is notoriously difficult to navigate in any form of transportation other than a car), I improved on my trip profile in alternative forms of transportation, dropping from 48% single occupancy car trips in June to 35% in July.

Trip Profile in July:

	Car	Transit	Walk	Other (air, car share, carpool, cycling)
My Trips	35%	18%	36%	11%
U.S. Average	83%	2%	10%	4%

Two longer trips during the month may have artificially increased the overall numbers: a train ride from Baltimore to DC and a roundtrip between Austin and Dallas using Zipcar. 

For example:

• These two trips account for 60% of the carbon emissions I avoided over the course of the month. Using EPA estimates of average passenger car CO₂ emissions, I more than doubled my avoidance of CO₂ from 32,000 grams in June to 82,000 grams in July – roughly equivalent to taking 4 cars off the road for a day.

• On the other hand, these trips were also likely responsible for lowering the average daily health benefits from increasing the number of trips I took using alternative forms of transportation. In spite of the change, I still scraped by with an average of 141 calories burned per day in transportation-related activities (1 calorie above the Surgeon General’s recommendation). And, I averaged the minimum recommendation of physical activity: 30 minutes per day.

• As relatively fast modes of transportation, these two trips may also have helped reduce the difference between my overall monthly average trip time and the baseline (the trip time in a single-occupancy car) from an average of 32 minutes a day in June to 22 minutes a day in July. 

Interestingly, in spite of the high cost of the train ticket and Zipcar reservation, on average I saved $1.36 per day in the cost of gas and mileage in July, a moderate improvement to my revised average savings in June of $1.22 per day.

But, as I experienced in July, there is no such thing as an average month. 

I am learning that location plays a large role in determining trip profile. In August, I am splitting my time between Austin and Houston. We’ll see how that affects my ability to maintain a similar array of cost savings, offset carbon emissions, and health benefits associated with active transportation.

When in Rome…

For those of us who live and work in low-density cities, the car is often seen as the preferred (if not the only) mode of day-to-day transportation. We only consider using other forms of transportation when we are on vacation in cities that are known for their rail and bus systems and their walking culture. What is seen as a method of last resort in our home town becomes a convenience and a luxury when we travel.

During a trip to Baltimore and D.C. a few weeks ago, I realized that, to some degree, my experiment in Austin trying to avoid car trips has a lot in common with some of the more memorable aspects of travel.

For example:

• The most desirable hotels are often located either near sights of interest or close to transportation hubs. In Austin, we chose to live in the center of town, in part, to take advantage of the density of bus lines, restaurants, grocery stores, and shops within walking distance of our apartment.  

• Walking is not just a means of transportation for tourists. It is often the best way to explore new surroundings. In Austin, I have found that I have started replicating my tendency when traveling to take different routes to and from a point of interest so that I can see more of the city. 

• Tourists are always on the alert for people, buildings, gardens, galleries, and meals that pique their interest. We often remember our vacations in detail, because we approach them in the spirit of observation and discovery. In contrast, we may not remember our day-to-day activities in such stark detail. In retrospect, one of the reasons I enjoyed living in Cambridge so much may be the level of observation and spirit of discovery that influenced the choice of transportation (subway, bus, walking) on any given day.

One of the unintended consequences of seeking out alternatives to driving in Austin has been a change in my approach to the daily commute. I have come to see it as a puzzle to be solved, not a collection of streets and highways to be navigated, which has added another layer of experience to my life here. I now start planning how to reach my next destination by wondering, “What new discovery will I make along the way?”

Up Close – surprises along the way

When I drive down the street, I sometimes feel that I am traveling in a bubble. This feeling can be comforting, particularly on a hot summer day in Texas. But, I have found that it reduces my ability to observe and appreciate my surroundings – the way details shift from day to day and season by season.

For example, we moved back to Austin at the end of spring. It seemed that everything was flowering, even in forgotten places like cracks in the sidewalk.

On one of my walks, I realized that a century plant I had passed dozens of times without really noticing it had produced a flower stalk that reached well into the middle branches of its neighboring oak tree.  The exuberance of the plant life was amazing.

And, then, over a period of two to three weeks, almost all of the flowers disappeared; it seemed that we had entered the much-feared summer, which can drag on for six+ months without any rain.

Last week, however, it started raining again. The plants went wild, and it really hit home that Austin is a water-scarce area.

• Plants that had apparently given up for the season burst back into bloom;

• flowers started appearing in unlikely places;

• and, my walks were punctuated with views of plants and animals that are not usually seen in drought-prone Austin.

Over the past week, the temperature crept back above 100. And, the flowers have started retreating again under the influence of the harsh summer sun. But, I now know to keep my eyes open on my walks for the surprisingly dramatic response of some plants and animals to subtle shifts in temperature, humidity, and rainfall.

Tracking My Trips: June 2012

Starting June 1, 2012, I have tracked all of my travel to see if I could reduce my dependence on driving without affecting my quality of life. I have summarized the first month of results from this experiment below.

Overall, my trip profile in June shows half the number of car trips of a typical individual in the U.S. (Source: 2009 data, National Household Travel Survey.)

	Car	Transit	Walk	Other (air, car share, carpool, cycling)
My Trips	48%	9%	37%	6%
U.S. Average	83%	2%	10%	4%

The Downside

• As expected, the biggest hit to my quality of life was time. On average, my travel time increased 32 minutes a day compared with the amount of time it would have taken me to travel the same distance in a car. Of course, this comparison does not take into account the recreational benefit associated with alternative forms of transportation, such as walking.

The Upside

• Health: Simply through my daily movements around the city, I burned 32 more calories and exercised 7 minutes longer per day than the U.S. Surgeon General’s recommendation of 30 minutes of moderate physical activity (equivalent to 140 calories for a 154 lb person).
• Savings: Even after factoring in the cost of bus tickets and car share rentals, on average, I saved $1.95 per day in the cost of gas and mileage. 
• Eco: Using U.S. EPA estimates of average passenger car CO2 emissions, I avoided 36,183 grams of CO2, which is roughly equivalent to taking 2 cars off the road for a day.

All in all, the first month of the experiment seems to have gone well. The increased trip time only became an inconvenience when I arrived late to a meeting. However, that only happened twice, and I am improving in my ability to time which bus to take and how far ahead of time I need to arrive at the bus stop.

We’ll see if I will be able to replicate this month’s trip profile in future months.

Are Urban Babies Multimodal?

A few months ago, a friend of mine who lives in New York received a book at her baby shower, Urban Babies Wear Black. It is a picture book of the supposedly typical activities and sights that an urban baby will see and experience: practicing yoga, visiting the museum, and, moving around the city in various forms of transportation.



I was reminded of this book a few days ago when a friend in Austin mentioned that he and his wife would likely have to buy a second car now that they are expecting their first child. They have not needed it until now; because, living in Central Austin and both working downtown, they have been able to move around by walking, carpooling, riding the bus, and using supplementary forms of transportation such as Car2Go. But, now that they will have an additional passenger to transport, they are worried that it will be too difficult to continue navigating the city in anything other than a car.

Their dilemma highlights the time-penalty of parenting in suburban cities. Parents spend a disproportionate amount of time driving their children from home to school, school to soccer practice, soccer practice to piano practice, piano practice to a friend’s house, and then, finally, home. The logistics and sheer amount of time involved in planning a multi-step trip using the Austin bus system Cap Metro can be overwhelming – if you can reach your destination in the first place.

• In my experience, Google Maps’ Public Transit option does not work as well in Austin as in other cities such as Boston and Washington, DC where a live-feed showing current bus locations is available both online and at many bus stops. 
• Car2Go, the car sharing program allowing one-way trips that I praised in my previous blog post, may not be an option for adults traveling with very small children, because Smart Cars are two-seater cars. It is therefore not surprising that during the month I have used the bus in Austin, I have seen only two small children on it.  

Photo Credit: Kramalot

If you are in the same situation as my friend – thinking about starting a family but not sure how to retain your freedom of movement in a city that does not easily accommodate any form of transportation other than the car – see below for four ideas on how to continue leading a mostly multimodal lifestyle with small children in a city like Austin.

1. Identify 3-5 services and amenities that need to be located within a 10-minute walking or cycling distance of your home in order to free you from dependence on the car. Examples include: a daycare, an elementary school, a playground and/or park, a grocery store, the pediatrician’s office, etc. Work with an urban realtor to identify neighborhoods that meet these criteria.   
2. When traveling with your child on the bus, prioritize destinations that do not require a transfer. Similar to air travel, the act of transferring from one bus to another with small children can be almost more of a hassle than it is worth.   
3. Once your kids are old enough, consider purchasing a tandem bicycle or adding an extension to your commuter bicycle, so that you can safely cycle to nearby destinations as a family. 
4. When your kids start school, work with the school administration and the PTA to launch a Safe Routes to School Program to designate safe ways for students to walk or cycle to and from school. Once a route is identified, consider joining with other families in the neighborhood to organize a walking or cycling school bus to and from school.

Please offer additional suggestions in the comments box.

Filling the Gap

Weather can make or break a trip across town using alternative forms of transportation – i.e., walking, cycling, bus, etc. – if you don’t have options.

Last week, I traveled to a morning meeting on the bus without a problem. It was a nice morning – sunny, low 70’s. I sat on a bench in the shade – a must in the Austin, Texas sun – for a few minutes while I waited for the bus to arrive.

When I arrived at my destination in South Austin, I walked through a cool, shaded residential neighborhood, arriving only a few minutes later than if I had driven there.

The next stage of my journey, traveling from the meeting location to my co-working space, Conjunctured, was not as pleasant. The weather had changed over the intervening hour and a half – and, not for the better. I found myself standing in 90+ heat at an unshaded bus stop on a loud, busy street with no prospect of a bus arriving for at least 20 minutes.

Not excited about losing part of my workday to another experiment with public transportation in Central Texas, I was on the verge of wishing I had driven our family car to the meeting, when it dawned on me that I could use car2go – one of several car sharing options in Austin. I tend to think of Zipcar when both my husband and I need to drive somewhere at the same time, because it worked so well when we lived in Cambridge. But, car2go was the right option in this situation, because it allows one-way trips.


So, I checked car2go’s website on my iPhone (check out their mobile apps here), found an available car parked less than a block from the bus stop, headed its way, hopped in, and arrived at conjunctured before the bus I was waiting for would have arrived at the bus stop.

In cities like Austin, where many buses run on 30, 45, and 60 minute schedules rather than the 10-20 minute schedules seen in cities with higher ridership, supplementary options like car2go fill an important gap that could otherwise discourage car owners from thinking of the bus system as a viable option for intown transportation.

The fundamental question of when it makes sense to take the bus rather than a form of transportation that you can control – e.g., driving, walking, or cycling – lies in being able to determine whether you can plan ahead to fit your schedule into the transit system’s schedule.

To wit, I rode back home that afternoon from my co-working space on the bus without a hitch. But, that was because I checked the bus schedule ahead of time and organized my work schedule to arrive at the bus stop (shaded, with a bench) several minutes before its scheduled arrival. If I had missed the bus, I probably would have used car2go a second time that day rather than wait in the heat for 45 minutes until the next bus was scheduled to arrive.

Nature, Hidden in Plain Sight

I was intrigued by a headline that came out of the “Walking and the Life of the City” Symposium held last week at NYU: “Walking: It’s What You Do Once You’ve Parked Your Car…”

According to presenters at the conference, research has found that we process more information about our surroundings when we walk to reach a destination than when we use other forms of transportation. This makes sense, because pedestrians move at a much slower speed than even cyclists.

However, another discovery I have made since I started this blog is that we discover different surroundings when we walk, particularly in comparison with driving or taking the bus.

A Case in Point

Before moving to Cambridge, MA in 2010, I lived in Central Austin for five years, frequenting the same grocery store that I have returned to now that we have moved back to town. From the street, the shopping center where the grocery store is located looks like a heavily built-up mega-block development, including a hospital, a medical office building, and a number of retail stores in addition to the grocery store.

View of One Entrance to the Development

While the development’s parking lot has more trees than most suburban strip shopping centers, there is no safe way for pedestrians to cross it without walking in the path of cars.

Typical Scene of a Pedestrian Crossing the Parking Lot

A safer design would have designated pedestrian-only pathways, so that shoppers could travel between their cars and the store without worrying about being run over.

Example of a Pedestrian Pathway Crossing a Different Parking Lot in Austin

Before I started walking to the grocery store, I had always reached it from the parking lot. So, I naturally assumed that the entire development was similarly un-pedestrian-friendly.

Imagine my surprise when I accessed it for the first time by walking in from the back and discovered a park hidden in the middle of the mega-block,

 complete with a series of wetlands to capture and clean storm water

and a group of athletes stretching under a massive oak tree.

Closeup of Athletes Stretching in the Shade

Since I discovered the park, my trips to the grocery store have taken on an added dimension. And, in spite of the heat, I prefer to walk there; because, by entering from the parking lot, I now know that I am missing out on an opportunity to spend a few minutes surrounded by nature, a rare occurrence in the middle of the city.

Imagining a New Role for Rooftops in Omaha

I just returned from spending a few days in Omaha, Nebraska attending a conference and visiting a friend (an architect) who lives and works in the revitalized downtown district known as the Old Market.

While I was in town, she hosted a design exercise on her apartment building’s rooftop terrace posing the following problem: How can rooftops play a larger part in encouraging an active, urban lifestyle in cities like Omaha?

Photo Credit: April Rice

View from Rooftop Terrace

Inspired by the fact that the view from the rooftop makes destinations appear closer to each other than from the ground, the designers imagined installing a new way to travel through the city using public pathways connecting one rooftop park or vegetable garden with the next.

Clearly, for the rooftop to play a more active role in urban life, it needs to be seen as accessible from the street level. The High Line park in New York City, which converted an elevated railroad track into a linear park, has worked hard to install visual cues from the street level that entice passersby up to the floating park. One idea in the design exercise envisioned a mechanism to lower rooftop garden plots to the street level so that city restaurants and residents could purchase their vegetables directly from a rooftop farmer.  I saw another attempt to connect the street level with a rooftop terrace on Saturday: painters installed on a rooftop terrace overlooking the Farmer’s Market.

Like the High Line, these painters may represent the beginning of a trend — building density by expanding activity beyond the street level up into buildings and to their rooftops.


POSTSCRIPT
A few notes on how my friend has organized her daily routine to increase transportation flexibility:

• While she owns a car, she uses it mainly for trips to areas of the city too far to ride her bicycle and for longer road trips. 
• She parks a commuter bike at work and a road bike at her apartment. That way, she can cycle directly from her office to her gym or other activities in the afternoons. As a side note, her office also stores one corporate commuter bike to encourage staff to take an active form of transportation to lunch and meetings. 

• But, mostly she walks—back and forth to work (½ mile); to the two small grocery stores within a block or two of her apartment; and, to the restaurants, bars, and shops in the Old Market.

Change of Scene

My journey begins at home. The location of one’s residence is arguably the most significant factor in how easy or difficult it will be to travel around on a day-to-day basis in something other than a car.

When we moved back to Austin, we chose to live in the center of town in large part because the block size and streets were designed at the human scale (as opposed to the car scale). We also looked for a location that was surrounded by amenities within a walkable or bikable distance.

Experts say that most people will walk or bike 10-15 minutes to reach an amenity such as a coffee shop, restaurant, grocery store, etc. Of course, those experts don’t necessarily live in Austin, where the temperature can exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit at 6pm on a summer evening. I will address that particular challenge in a future post.

For now, it is enough to compare my old street in Cambridge (left photo below) with my new street in Austin (right).

For a few months while we are settling back in, we are the beneficiaries of a movement in Austin to increase density by allowing garage apartments to be constructed along back streets and alleyways.

From the photo of the alley behind our furnished apartment, you would never know that we live right in the thick of things. And, to add to the feeling of living in the country…

Our landlords keep a chicken coop below our apartment.


















Our apartment is perched among birds and squirrels running through the oak tree canopy.

And, we have traded the noise of the city for birdsong in the mornings and evenings.

 

Our new home is definitely a change from the hustle and bustle of Harvard Square. It remains to be seen whether I will be able to keep the number of car trips I take to a minimum in my new surroundings.