Re the argument “I need cheap parking in the city because I have to have my car for my job.”
If my job required me to have a personal elephant, I wouldn’t think it
reasonable to keep it in the city and park it on the street at night.
General
Paris: The Street is Ours!
Next time you’re involved in a debate about whether we should consider taking one lane of traffic on a busy street and setting it aside for buses, show them some pictures of Paris today. Almost any boulevard, in fact. Here’s Boulevard Raspail:
Lots of traffic in two lanes, and a lane reserved for buses and two-wheels conveyances. Yes, the bus lane is empty at the moment, but this demonstrates the great and damnable paradox of bus lanes: If buses are moving well, and carrying more people than the car lanes, the bus lane looks empty most of the time. Only a failing or obstructed bus lane looks like it’s full of buses. That’s why bus lanes are such a hard sell in cities run by motorists who want to do the green thing but still form their impressions from behind the wheel of a car. Continue Reading →
Paris: Customer Service as Modern Art
Sometimes automated customer service is so bad that it becomes a kind of modern art. Today, arriving at Paris’s Gare de l’Est to pick up my pre-booked electronic TGV ticket, I discovered that the machines for this purpose didn’t like my credit card, so I was told there was no choice but to wait in the general ticketing queue of the SNCF (the French national railway), which took about an hour.
The queue gave me plenty of time to study the row of ticket windows, mostly unstaffed, and the convenient electronic signs above each one. As often happens at airports, these signs were mostly saying irrelevant things. One sign, for example, specified international sales, and another domestic sales, even though we were clearly all in one queue and they were just taking whoever was next. The faux-order conveyed by these signs is harmless enough, as long as nobody takes them seriously. Continue Reading →
Quote of the Week: Railways vs Democracy
From Vilas Bajaj’s New York Times profile of India’s over-capacity and low-speed railway network. (The system moves 7 billion passenger trips per year, or roughly 7 times the population of the country.)
Critics say the growth and modernization of Indian Railways has been hampered by government leaders more interested in winning elections and appeasing select constituents, rather than investing in the country’s long-term needs. It is one of the many ways that the political realities of India’s clamorous democracy stand in contrast to the forced march that China’s authoritarian system can dictate for economic development.
Has any democracy found an effective way around this? Journalists here in Australia love to reduce all transport infrastructure questions to political calculations around marginal seats in Parliament — and sometimes they’re right. The best solution we encountered in the Sydney Morning Herald Inquiry was to create a professionalized agency with a bit of autonomy from the Minister of Transport — responsive to government for large-scale goals but not detailed decisions of implementation, phasing, and operations. If you don’t like these things, you call them bureaucracies. But so far, they seem to be the least-bad solution I’ve seen.
Is Speed Obsolete? … The wrap-up, for now
Almost two months ago now, I did a post focused on startling claims, by Professor Patrick Condon of the University of British Columbia, that we should focus more of our transit investment on relatively slow services — for which his model is the Portland Streetcar — rather than faster ones, such as Vancouver’s SkyTrain driverless rapid transit system. The resulting post is just the overture. Discussion continued in the long, rich comment string. There’ve also been some follow-up posts, and I’ve featured his response. Continue Reading →
Comment of the Week
From Ben on the previous post, concerning the environmental impact reporting process for major transit infrastructure:
Guest Post: Ron Kilcoyne on the Future of U.S. Transit Operations Funding
This guest post is by Ron Kilcoyne, General Manager/CEO of Greater Bridgeport Transit in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
Ron’s previous positions include CEO of Santa Clarita Transit near Los Angeles and manager of research and planning for AC Transit in Oakland,
California. The views expressed are his own and not those of his agency. Ron’s previous post on this topic is here.
Continue Reading →
Applying Highway Concepts to Transit
One of this blog’s recurrent themes is that we need to notice when people are thinking about transit as though it worked just like roads and cars. Our transportation bureaucracies are full of people who’ve been trained to understand traffic, and who sometimes struggle to extend that mental framework to transit. One of the most important American “bibles” on public transit, the Transit Capacity and Quality of Service Manual, was explicitly designed to imitate the structure and style of the AASHTO Highway Capacity Manual, because it saw traffic experts as one of its key audiences. Continue Reading →
Can We Cycle the “Last Mile”?
Max Utility asks, in a comment:
I would be interested to see your take on how transit systems can better integrate bicycles into their plans to solve ‘last mile’ issues. Even on systems I’ve used that are relatively welcoming to bikes (see Berlin) it always appears to be something of an after thought and the awkwardness seems to discourage multi-modal riders.
Since I am primarily a bicycle advocate, I’m also interested to hear any thoughts on how the bicycle advocacy groups could work better with transit system operators to improve both sets of infrastructure since they do seem to be mutually supporting when properly integrated.
Portland: The Lure of the Unmeasurable
A while back, Aaron Renn at the Urbanophile did an interesting post on Portland. Anyone who loves the city will find it engaging and challenging, as I did, and I wanted to expand on a comment I made there at the time. (I lived there from 1969 to 1980 and was later based there as a transit planning consultant, 1994-2003.)
Comparing Portland to his hometown, Indianapolis, he notices that the two cities score about the same on many metrics — job growth, domestic in-migration, GDP, etc. — even though Portland is a nationally renowned achievement in urban planning and lifestyle while Indianapolis is a pretty ordinary Midwestern city surrounded by lots of sprawl. The core of his observation is in this quotation from Alissa Walker at Good: Continue Reading →