Jarrett Walker’s philosophy of public transit as means to freedom

Philosophers have long struggled to make sense of human existence and the freedom (perhaps illusory) that it provides.

“Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains,” wrote Rousseau, lamenting the shackles of modernity’s frenetic demands nearly 270 years ago.

“Man is condemned to be free,” argued Sartre, sounding bitter in 1948.

“Frequency is freedom,” said Jarrett Walker, earnestly in a philosophy lecture disguised as a talk on transit planning Monday night at PennDesign.

Walker, an aptly-named transportation consultant and unexpected holder of a Stanford PhD in humanities, explicated his human-focused way of seeing transit before a crowd of city planners, SEPTA staffers, PennDesign students and others predisposed to laugh heartily at lines like, “I’m as addicted to smartphones as the next guy—they have made us realize how boring it is to drive.”

Walker is the author of Human Transit, a transit planning treatise and blog of the same name, which both espouse framing discussions about bus routes and fare transfer policies in lofty concepts like “freedom” and “liberty”.

“We all have a sense about freedom and imprisonment—It’s about not being able to move,” began Walker. “We are all in a prison, physically speaking, where the walls are where we can get to in a reasonable amount of time.” The goal of transportation planning is to increase the abundance of access, argued Walker. Faintly echoing John Stuart Mill’s “Utilitarianism,” Walker advocated for creating transit systems that help as many people as possible reach as many destinations as possible, as quickly as possible, so that they have as many real choices and opportunities as possible. Or, in other words: transit as a means to freedom.

The idea throws the usual conception of public transportation on its head: Most riders are “captive” passengers constrained and resigned to a bus commute, compared to the “choice” riders who have better options. Frequently, increasing ridership is framed as increasing choice riders, but Walker challenges planners to focus on the dependent riders.

That is to say: Imagine what kind of service the dependent bus rider would want, and deliver that, rather than trying to dream up a service for the choice rider. Choice riders are the hypothetical people don’t ride now, and whom some planners try to build transit systems for. Walker advocated for planners to treat current riders the way some tech companies treat early adopters and beta testers.

Such unconventional takes on taking the bus have made Walker a rock star in the transit planning world, which is a roundabout way of saying he managed to fill around half of a large lecture hall. Speaking of roundabout ways, they are a pet peeve of Walker’s, who preaches on the power of linear transit routes and grid systems to improve services.

Walker simultaneously simplifies transit planning and elevates it. It’s all simple geometry for Walker – the shortest (and thus fastest) route between two points is a straight line, we only have so much space available for cars, and more vehicles per route means more frequency and more riders. And all of that means more human freedom, the simple liberty of movement.

“It may be my philosophical training: I start with skepticism,” said Walker, channeling his inner Karl Popper. “I start with what I know. That’s why I start with geometry—I’m sure about that, and in a way that I’m not sure with psychology or human behavior.”

Consequently, Walker eschews ridership predictions as fool’s errands and a distraction to boot, favoring instead “isochrone” maps, which show how far a person can get via foot and mass transit in a certain amount of time, i.e. the limits of their practical freedom. “Does any ordinary person even care [about predictions]?” He asked rhetorically. “What if we talked about people’s liberty and freedom—things people actually care about?”