Human Transit welcomes guest posts. Guest posts are usually from people who are very familiar with this blog and/or have some proven expertise in the area to be discussed. Explore the Guest Post category to see examples of others that have been accepted.
This blog assumes readers have decent critical thinking skills. They don’t need happy talk or vagueness; they need information and clear argument that explores real issues and trade-offs. Continue Reading →
Recently I posted on the importance of frequency mapping in network maps. Most transit network maps, I argued, show all the transit lines but make it impossible to sort through them to figure out, quickly, which are likely to be useful. The bottom line: A map that makes all the lines look equally important is as useful as a road map that makes a freeway look just like a dirt road. Continue Reading →
If you want a vivid map of what our friends in Christchurch, New Zealand have been going through, here’s a simple animation of the size, location, and intensity of the ongoing series of earthquakes. It comes by way of friends at NZ in Tranzit, who are also on top of the local transit news.
Quite a bit of damage in the historic urban core. 7.1 was about the magnitude that caused my 1989 near-death experience in Stanford’s Memorial Church, so I can only imagine what it must have been like in Christchurch’s many historic buildings, such as the Art Centre (pictured here in 2005).
HT has a number of readers in Christchurch, including Dave Welch who writes NZ in Tranzit blog, and who may now be regretting his recent over-reliance on earthquake metaphors.
It’s a beautiful city. If you’ve never been there, you should visit. But probably not today.
Hope everyone’s OK, and bravo to everyone’s who’s keeping the city functioning during the emergency.
… where your job is to give two inspiring presentations to a large group of bus operations and scheduling managers. You want to help them feel that the fairly mundane work that many of them do is important for the future of the world. What do you tell them?
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.
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 →
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 →
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 →