Auckland Transport is recommending the higher-end median busway solution for a difficult suburban arterial corridor that we studied for them last year. (The corridor extends from Panmure rail station through Pakuranga to Botany via Pakuranga and Ti Rakau Roads.) It would be the main radial rapid transit corridor for Auckland’s far eastern suburbs. Continue Reading →
Archive | 2010
Basics: Some Tools for Small Cities
Early in my career, I did a number of network designs for free-standing small cities in the American West. These cities, say populations of 30,000-100,000, tend to have a similar set of problems and opportunities, and could probably benefit from a little more theoretical focus. The same issues arise in most of these cities across North America, Australia, and New Zealand, including: Continue Reading →
Email of the Week: Toward Aggregated Information?
A reader who works for a North American transit professional organization writes:
Often transit centers only provide access to one provider and exclude others, or only provide access to local providers but not to regional providers. That silo system carries over to the information that transit agencies manage or make available to their customers in most cases. Do you have some good examples where services and customer information is more regional ie all the options in the region whether public or private.
Seattle: Quick Notes on “Rapid Ride”
Seattle’s main transit agency, King County Metro, is beginning to roll out a rapid bus product called Rapid Ride. Continue Reading →
Email of the Week: Dept. of Blindingly Obvious Ideas
From a frequent commenter:
I was thinking about transit websites, and I had a thought that struck me with how blindingly obvious it is, and I’m surprised for some reason I don’t think I’ve seen any transit agency do this before. On the main timetable page, they will generally have a menu to let you pick a route, and give you the timetable and map for that route. But those are leaf pages, they don’t link to anything other than back to the menu. My thought is, the web is all about links, so why not make the structure of the timetable pages reflect that of the route network, and for any route to which there’s a transfer, provide a link to that route’s timetable right there on the page? With fancy web design, I’m sure even more elaborate things can be made, like letting you see what transfers you can make for a particular run of a route. But in general, this seems like one of those things that can greatly enhance the public’s understanding of how the transit network works, and I’m surprised that I don’t recall seeing this anywhere before.
If you know of a transit agency that does this, please comment with a link to a sample timetable page!
Basics: Finding Your Pulse
Quiz: When is service every 20 minutes worse than service every 30 minutes?
Answer: When it relies on a pulse, or what Americans usually call timed transfer, with routes that run every 30. Continue Reading →
Melbourne: A Frequent Network Map
Peter Parker of Melbourne on Transit recently sketched some frequent network maps for that city, the second largest in Australia. You can find a range of efforts for various cities using the Frequent Network category. My original post arguing for the value of frequent network maps is here.
Although Melbourne is mostly flat and its street network is mostly gridded, it’s striking how few crosstown or “orbital” services they are. Over the past few years the main government initiative in this area has been the SmartBus program, a set of new frequent orbital routes. Yet compared to comparably dense parts of Los Angeles, say, the grid is thin. Continue Reading →
Seattle: Notes on the “Snowpocalypse”
As Seattle moves into the recriminations phase on last week’s snowstorm, locally known as the “snowpocalypse,” let’s put some things in perspective:
Seattle has a particular vulnerability to snow and ice that is unique in North America. The uniqueness is in the intersection of four factors: Continue Reading →
Thanksgiving English Quiz: Grammar in The New York Times
Can this sentence, from the New York Times article on the DeLay conviction, be read as anything other than evidence of the collapse of journalism, and hence of language, and hence of civilization?
To be guilty of money laundering, the prosecution had to show the money had been obtained through an illegal activity before it was laundered.
They succeeded in showing that, so I guess that means the prosecution is guilty of money laundering.
This is the frigging NYTimes! Are there no editors sharp-eyed enough to change “To be guilty of …” to “To prove …” ? Predicates need subjects! Otherwise they run wild and incriminate innocent people.
Update: Commenter GD provides the necessary transit angle on this story:
William Safire is rotating in his grave. The question now is how to harness that energy and power rail transit with it 😉
Happy Thanksgiving to American readers. If you had to fly in the USA yesterday, I hope it was stimulating.
Los Angeles: Some Thoughts on the Challenge for “The Source”
The blog of the main Los Angeles transit agency, The Source, interviewed me recently on the challenges and opportunites of Los Angeles as a transit metropolis. It was a chance to pull some of the main themes of this blog together as applied to that fascinating city. They’ve published it in two parts, but here is the whole thing: Continue Reading →