For the last four months, I’ve been part of a team looking at the big-picture problems of public transport in Sydney, sponsored but not controlled by the city’s main newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald. We released the draft report today, so I can finally talk about it. Continue Reading →
Author Archive | Jarrett
New York: Free Student Fares and the Budget Crisis
Today’s New York Times editorial on New York’s transit funding crisis goes beyond general warnings about the need to fund transit and digs into specifics: Raise bridge tolls, resist election year tax-cutting, hold the line on pay raises, and this:
What it should not mean is doing away with free passes for needy students. Both the state and city will have to contribute more to help pay $214 million a year to help keep these students in school.
Perhaps they read this.
Email of the Week: Should Ridership Data Be Online?
A contact at Portland’s TriMet (not anyone I’ve named on the blog) writes with an interesting point:
There is an internal TriMet web site, accessible to all TriMet employees, including drivers and mechanics, that has a wealth of information, such as budgets, ridership, etc. While all of this could potentially be misinterpreted, it seems to me that it should all be available to the public in a section of the public web site. I shouldn’t have to feel sneaky when I provide you with extracts from this material.
Vancouver: An Olympic Urbanist Preview
Over the next two weeks, we’ll see a lot of Vancouver, one of the most remarkable achievements in 20th Century urbanism. If you’re going to promote transit anywhere, especially in North America or Australasia, it’s an important city to know about.
As the Olympic Winter Games run, I’ll do a series of posts on Vancouver transit issues (interspersed with some Sydney news that will break over the weekend). I’ll rely on my own experience living and working there in 2005-6, my annual visits since then, and the insights of my former colleagues. But my single best source is probably my friend Gordon Price, a former city councilman and frequent speaker on urbanist issues around the world. His friendly blog Price Tags is my first bookmark for Vancouver’s news on sustainable transport and urban design. (Just today, for example, he posted a link to a spectacular aerial montage, a bit like Google Street View from an altitude of 500m or so. It’s a great way to explore the city.)
What’s special about Vancouver? It’s a new dense city, in North America. Continue Reading →
Privatized Transit and (or vs.) The Public Good
Tony Judt has a fascinating piece at New York Review of Books on the ideal of social democracy manifested by most European governments: a democratic state with relatively high levels of taxes and government services. Writing from a leftist perspective, he worries about the recent rise of economic analysis as a primary basis for government decisions. This trend, which he traces to Margaret Thatcher, has shaped the thinking of a generation of bureaucrats, not just in Britain but throughout the Commonwealth and also in parts of Continental Europe. It’s almost universal in the British-derived cultures of Australia and New Zealand, where I work now. Here, it often seems an idea about transit counts for nothing if it can’t be expressed in terms of “Cost Benefit Evaluation” (CBE) and “Key Performance Indicators” (KPI). Continue Reading →
Transit Advertising and Transit Self-Esteem
This Air New Zealand ad, on a bus shelter in Sydney, raises the issue of transit self-esteem. “$100 says the bus won’t be late,” it says, then, in much smaller print: “Looks like you win.”
Should transit agencies accept advertising that demeans their service?
Advertisers are often tempted to do exactly that, especially when selling vacations or other forms of escape from the everyday. The bus is both a profitable site of advertising and an irresistible metaphor for the tedious life. If you imagine your transport mode as a romantic partner, the bus in mixed traffic is the worst of both worlds: neither sexy nor capable of commitment. When advertising on a bus, it’s not surprising that advertisers find ways to play on that. Continue Reading →
Technology Obsessions in the U.S. National Transit Database
The US National Transit Database (NTD) is out for 2008! (Yes, a one year lag counts as fast in this business.) For those of you who aren’t compulsively drawn to spreadsheets, Cap’n Transit tries to get to the bottom of farebox recovery, the percentage of operating costs paid by fares.
Farebox Recovery Ratio Agencies 70-200% Lincoln Tunnel buses, inclined planes, Hudson River ferries, SEPTA [Philadelphia] trolleybuses 40-69% Big city rail, college town buses 30-39% Big city bus and light rail 0.1-29% Small and medium city bus and light rail, plus assorted boondoggles 0 Free services
The Apple iPad: A Boost for Buses Over Trains?
Tory Gattis at New Geography argues that mobile computing products such as the new Apple iPad will be a boon for transit, but not for trains: Continue Reading →
On Incompleteness (of Networks, of Life …)
Reader Russell Bozian thinks he spies a theme coursing through recent posts.
Will partially built houses ever be energy efficient? Ones where the walls are up, but the roof has not been put on yet? If you don’t qualify for a full home loan, will banks even lend you half the money you need to build a house? Will the banks figure that you can at least have half a good life, living in a house with walls but no roof? …
Jarrett, your original post wonders out loud why Portland can spend tens of millions on transit and not, in 2010, see a much higher percentage of people commuting to work on public transport. But at the present build rate, won’t it take at least until 2050 before Portland has a comprehensive and ubiquitous public transport network, such as we see in Manhattan? Why do we starve public transport of the money it needs to finish a decent network of routes, and then pause to criticize its incomplete performance statistics? Would we ponder why the waterworks is not delivering much water to our faucets, if we only gave them enough money and right of way for each water line to stop 100 feet short of our houses?
Continue Reading →
Comment of the Week
On the phenomenology of crowding and reliability, from Alon Levy:
People’s perception of utilization is always going to be skewed upward. There are always more people to witness crowding than emptiness. If half the trains run at 100% capacity, and half run at 20%, then five sixths of passengers will see 100% crowding rather than 20%; therefore, real utilization will be 60%, while perceived utilization will be 87%.
Continue Reading →