In my book Human Transit, I argued that the underlying geometry of transit requires communities to make a series of choices, each of which is a tradeoff between two things that are popular. I argued that these hard choices are appropriate assignments for elected boards, because there is no technical ground for making one choice or the other. What you choose should depend on what your community wants transit to do. Examples of these choices include the following: Continue Reading →
Basics
can “network primers” reduce grief about network design?
does suburban local service get cars off the road? (updated)
See new updates at the end, based on comments to May 4.
Ricky Leong in the Calgary Sun on why Calgary should spend more money serving far-flung suburbs: Continue Reading →
basics: the “new route” problem
When people think of a new transit need, they often jump prematurely to the idea that they need a new route. This article of mine — linked to in Chapter 7 of my book — explains why this can be a bad idea.
Network Design for High Ridership, a Small Dense City Example
How do transit network designers go about their task? Surprisingly little has been written about this. You can pick up books that appear to cover the “network planning” or “network redesign” process and find examples of good and bad networks but rarely a description of how to do the design thinking itself. Continue Reading →
basics: dead running
The British/Australian term “dead running” means “running out of service, unavailable for passengers.” I like the term because it could be the title of a zombie movie. I look forward to seeing if it attracts hits. Continue Reading →
stuff you need to know
If you want to do things with transit, you need to understand some basics about its geometry and costs, facts that may raise interesting questions about your own goals. Continue Reading →
basics: walking distance to transit
The question of walking distance in transit is much bigger than it seems. A huge range of consequential decisions — including stop spacing, network structure, travel time, reliability standards, frequency and even mode choice — depend on assumptions about how far customers will be willing to walk. The same issue also governs the amount of money an agency will have to spend on predictably low-ridership services that exist purely for social-service or “equity” reasons. Continue Reading →
how universal is transit’s geometry?
Suppose that somewhere else in our universe, there’s another planet with intelligent life. We don’t know what they look like, or what gases they breathe, or what they eat, or whether they’re inches or miles tall. We don’t know whether they move by hopping, drifting, or slithering. We don’t even know if their lived environment is largely two-dimensional, like the surface of the earth, or freely three dimensional, perhaps a cloud-city full of cloud-beings who drift up and down as easily as they drift left or right. We don’t know what they call themselves, so let’s call them borts. Continue Reading →
basics: branching (or how transit is like a river)
A short draft chapter from the book, overlapping the content of this recent post but with an extended BART example that I hope readers will enjoy and have comments on.
In 2011, cartographer Daniel Huffman thought it would be interesting to draw river systems as though they were subways. Figure 1 shows part of his sketch of the Lower Mississippi.[i] Continue Reading →