General

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.

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 →

From Ben on the previous post, concerning the environmental impact reporting process for major transit infrastructure:

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 →

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 →

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.

Continue Reading →

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 →

Responding to my post on Los Angeles as a transit metropolis, Atrios on the Eschaton blog speculates that the fate of transport in Los Angeles depends on three things, two of which are matters of “the psychology of the place.” Continue Reading →

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s campaign to accelerate the construction of rail transit in his city is deservedly in the news, not just for his own persistence but also for the excitement it’s generating in the Obama administration, in Congress, and in other cities who would love to see a precedent-setting response.  But it’s also very useful and inspiring to transit planners working overseas, like me. Continue Reading →

There is nothing inherently convenient about cars, or about any
vehicle. It is the system that makes them convenient, and that system
includes both the vehicle and the infrastructure. Provide unlimited,
subsidized “free” car infrastructure, and cars will be convenient. Run
buses often, everywhere, all the time, and buses will be convenient.
Put everything in a giant skyscraper with computer-controlled
elevators, and elevators will be convenient. Trains, walking, bayou
boats, swinging from vines, conveyor belts, scuba diving: whatever it
is, if you throw enough money at the infrastructure you can make it
convenient.

      — Cap’n Transit, “On the Supposed Convenience of Cars“

UPDATE:  I should add that while I am quoting this approvingly, I do have issues with the word convenient, which I explained here.