Everyone should know how to respond to stories like this, because they’ll keep coming. From Kevin Libin at Canada’s National Post, an article called ‘Save the Environment: Don’t Take Transit.” It quotes the usual suspects, but it still needs a clear response: Continue Reading →
General
Attention, Transit Professionals!
Are you currently employed in some aspect of public transit planning, management, policy, or operations? Do you deal with public transit as part of your job, which could be in anything from town planning to social services to journalism? If so, please click the email button under my photograph at right, if only to tell me who you are. I’d like to know that you’re out there reading. You’re also encouraged to submit comments that way.
Most comments on this blog seem to come from people who are interested in transit as advocates or activists, and their input continues to be encouraged. I hear less often from professionals who read the blog; I suspect that’s because of professional risks associated with stating opinions under your own name. That’s fine, but I’d still like to hear your perspectives, so use email. Continue Reading →
Bus Rapid Transit Stop Spacing: Is 2 Miles Too Far?
Joseph E asks an excellent question in response to my last post about the new Swift BRT, in Snohomish County north of Seattle. Here’s the heart of it:
Jarrett,
do you feel the wide stop spacing is a benefit? I was inclined to think the stations are too far apart. In comparison, commuter rail stops every 1 to 3 miles in most places (well, on the East and West coast), but always has an exclusive right-of-way, crossing gates, and high-speed operation between stations.BRT should be capable of accelerating faster than diesel commuter trains, and obviously can stop much faster than even light rail. So why not have stations every 1/2 to 1 mile? It is much easier to walk 5 or 10 minutes to a station than walk to a local bus stop and transfer a mile down the road.
Bus Rapid Transit: Notes from a Pro
Although I’ve done some Bus Rapid Transit planning, my Canadian colleague, Steve Schijns, has been doing it for decades, including important work in both Ottawa and Brisbane. He’s also up to date on a lot of the BRT happening around Toronto. In response to my previous post, he sent along these thoughts, which I thought I’d share verbatim: Continue Reading →
“Bus Rapid Transit”: Getting Past the Trauma
Since I began seriously reading US transit blogs about a year ago, it’s been apparent that many US activists have a problem with the term “Bus Rapid Transit.” My goal in my recent post on the Brisbane busway system was to illustrate a dramatically different vision of BRT from what Americans are used to, and thus to help US activists stretch and broaden their notions of what BRT can mean. Continue Reading →
On Scramble Crossings
Peter Parker at Melbourne on Transit has an interesting analysis of “scramble crossings” at signals. Scramble crossings are phases of a signal that give pedestrians the green in all directions, so that they can cross in any direction including diagonally across the intersection. Sydney, where I live, has exactly one of them, to my knowledge. It’s right in front of Town Hall. Continue Reading →
A Silver Medal for the Silver Line?
Everyone should peruse the comment thread on my last post, “Should we ride mediocre transit?” If the post and its thread helps you clarify and explain your own view on the question, then this blog is doing its job. (Yes, there’s still no tip jar; I still have a salary as a transit planning consultant, but you’ll be the first to know if I don’t!)
Among the comments, Brian suggested that we need a system
… to “certify” transit systems on a Bronze-Silver-Gold scale according to criteria like frequency, operating hours, accessibility, travel time and so forth.” (Emphasis mine.)
Certification schemes such as Brian proposes function just like those notorious “rankings” — whether for cities or universities or transit lines. They sort a bunch of disparate data and somehow reduce it to a single score. To get there, they do two very different things:
The US$1 Bill Abolition Campaign Begins with You!
I wonder if a concerted high-visibility campaign in one transit-intensive US city might drive the issue to prominence. It wouldn’t even need to come from the government. Suppose, for example, that one prominent locally-based merchant in, say, San Francisco announced that from now on, they’d be giving out only $1 coins as change. This could be one of those good-corporate-citizen moves, designed to support transit patronage by putting dollar coins in people’s pockets. (I suspect they would also find that the change would result in faster service for the merchant’s customers, since coins are faster to grab and count than bills.)
Mundane Things That Matter: Abolish US$1 Bills!
If the Obama administration wanted to strike a dramatic blow for public transit, one that would immediate speed up transit journeys all across America, they would abolish the $1 bill, and get everyone used to the $1 coin.
Travelling in the US last month, I had several opportunities to feed dollar bills into fareboxes. Even if you have perfectly flattened your dollar bill, and folded out all its corners, the process takes at least three seconds per bill, and often closer to five, during which a bus or streetcar with a 100+ passengers goes nowhere.
The Revolution on Transit
Amid the mounting civil unrest in Iran’s capital, when everyone fears that mass violence may be imminent, let’s pause to notice that the Tehran Metro is still running.
Andrew Sullivan‘s wall-to-wall coverage includes this cellphone-video record of a ride on the Metro on this exuberant and anxious day.
It’s an immense challenge to keep a transit system running in such conditions. Transit operations are a real-time collaboration of many people with different political views. The fierce disagreement inflaming the population must also divide and arouse the transit workforce. Some may even feel tempted to distort the operation in a way that benefits their side of the conflict. In such conditions the necessary teamwork becomes a real test of an operating company and its staff.
Obviously, there are baser considerations at work. I’m sure the government would have shut down the metro — which is clearly helping the opposition assemble larger crowds than the government can muster — if they didn’t need to maintain the illusion that life is normal in Tehran apart from a few hooligans.
But I just want to recognise the ordinary drivers and dispatchers and attendants who are keeping the Metro running in these days of terrifying uncertainty. It’s not just diligence, it’s courage.