Jarrett Walker
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. Walker is the author of the blog Human Transit and book of the same name. Career In the 1970s, Walker became interested in transit issues while using Portland's TriMet bus system. He later worked as a planning intern at TriMet. Walker is the president of Jarrett Walker + Associates, a consultancy that contracts with public transit agencies. He and his firm have completed transit redesign projects in dozens of cities throughout the world, including Houston, Moscow, Auckland, and Dublin. The author has written several peer-reviewed papers, including "To Predict with Confidence", published in the Journal of Public Transportation in 2018, and "Purpose-Driven Public Transport," published in the Journal of Transport Geography in 2008. He has also been published in the peer-reviewed Shakespeare Quarterly. He has also written for Bloomberg CityLab and The Atlantic. In December 2017, Walker attracted media attention after publicly feuding with billionaire Elon Musk. The Tesla CEO expressed his disdain for public transit and reiterated his preference for individual transportation in response to a conference audience question. 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." Musk responded with "You're an idiot", before saying: "Sorry... meant to say 'sanctimonious idiot.'" The dispute led to a broader debate about Musk's opinions on transit. 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"). 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. Walker has argued that transit agencies' focus on predictions and new technologies distracts from necessary improvements to existing transportation systems. However, 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. In Houston, Walker proposed creating a grid of bus routes with frequent service instead of focusing on expanding physical coverage, and the city ultimately implemented his recommendations, reporting an 11% increase in ridership on weekdays and a 30% increase on weekends a year later. Walker has often asserted that "frequency is freedom" – frequent transit service helps people better access their communities, and that buses are often the most affordable way to expand transit service. To highlight the importance of service frequency, he said that a bus frequency of 15 minutes is as useless as a car that could only leave its home every 15 minutes. In his book Human Transit, he lists seven requirements for a good public transit