General

The call for presentations is out for this year's GIS in Transit Conference, October 16-18, 2013, at the Keck Center of the National Academies in Washington, D.C. The conference planning committee is seeking proposals focused on uses of geographic and spatial analysis to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of transit planning, operations and marketing.

Some of the examples of topics the organizers have in mind will look familiar to Human Transit readers: using GTFS feeds to publish transit data and third-party applications for transit are just two from a much longer list. Proposals are due April 15. Have a look at the call for presentations for full details and submission requirements, or visit the conference website for more information.

I've recently learned of a new resource for sharing knowledge and best practices related to transit planning: transitwiki.org. The project is funded by Caltrans and managed by the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies, and is a novel response to California agencies' financial constraints that have limited the ability of staff to travel and attend conferences. As you would expect, much of the content so far is drawn from contributors' experiences working in California, but the wiki contains quite a lot of generally useful information on a variety of topics related to transit funding, management, planning, and operations. For more information, visit the website or the project's new twitter account. 

Rhonda — Click here to pay by credit card — Jarrett

If you've arrived from the link in today's article in the New Zealand Herald, welcome!  The best introduction to my own thinking on the Auckland network redesign, with remarkable maps, is here.  Meanwhile, the post below is a big-picture argument about the set of choices that the redesign proposes, and the relationships among them …

Charles Blow in the NYT has a piece today arguing that Rosa Parks was not the meek figure of legend but something of a firebrand, "as much Malcolm X as she is Martin Luther King Jr."  Cap'n Transit thought this might be a good time to ask, "What happened to Montgomery's bus system?"  He found the answer in a remarkable 13-year old piece in the Nation, by JoAnn Wypijewski:

From 1977 to 1999 a white … Republican named Emory Folmar was mayor, and he made the bus system scream. … Advertising income disappeared after Folmar tried to bar an anti-death penalty ad and then decided that if he couldn't discriminate among advertisers he wouldn't have any at all. By the fortieth anniversary of the bus boycott, service had been cut by 70 percent and fares had doubled, to $1.50. Student and old-age discounts were eliminated. In 1996 midday service stopped. Finally, in 1997, the City Council said there just weren't enough riders or revenue; the traditional system of big buses and fixed routes was finished. 

However, things have clearly bounced back this piece was written in 2000.  Today Montgomery has a simple, radial fixed route system of 16 routes, running at headways ranging from 30 to 60 minutes with some evidence of a downtown pulse.  It's not much service in the context of a metro area of over 350,000 — especially one where a state capitol and university.  But you start where you are, or where you retreated to.  

The Newport Game Board is slightly large for some email accounts, so it can be downloaded here:

Download GAME BOARD

What advice would you give to this emailer? I'm not especially up to date on development approval processes, and have seen none that really capture the crucial Be on the Way issue:

I was wondering whether you were aware of any municipalities who require a 'transit impact study' or something like it on new residential construction?

Here in Halifax (and I'm sure this is very common), an applicant must do a traffic impact study for any new development to demonstrate that the existing road network won't be wrecked by their plans. However, it seems to me that identifying and labelling transit-unserviceable projects during their approvals process would be a good thing. As you say, choices can be made, and they can still be built, but the fact that they can never reasonably be serviced by public transit should be labelled during the decision-making process.

Are you aware of any examples of this being required during rezoning/development approvals processes? 

Register and pay here using PayPal for the New York session of the Interactive Course in Network Design, on Feb 6-7, 2014.  Just click the drop-down menu to select any applicable discount.  (If you select “5 or more” you must select a quantity of 5 or more for this transaction; this is the group discount.

One more thing:  Make sure we have the registrant’s name, affiliation, and email, especially if this is different from the purchaser’s.  On the page where you submit your credit card, there’s a place to give us this info, if you haven’t already emailed it to us.  

Register and pay here using PayPal for the Washington DC session of the Interactive Course in Network Design. Just click the drop-down menu to select your discount (discounts are explained here). Then, click Buy Now.