Information Requests

I'm in the copyedit phase of my book, which I've been sternly advised is my last chance to substantially change the text.  So of course I'm stumbling on lots of odd little uncertainties, and I have a few questions for transit and transport experts out there.

Feel free to help me out on any of these!  (Try not to say anything too immortal in the comments, as this post will be deleted when it's served its purpose.)

1. Roughness.  Based on usage I've heard from traffic engineers, I use this word to mean "delay in a traffic lane adjacent to a curb or parking lane caused by events such as delivery trucks and taxis stopping for customers, cars engaged in parallel parking movements, car doors being opened into your lane, slow cyclists sharing the traffic lane, and so on."  But attempts to google a definition founder on the more common sense of "pavement roughness."  Is roughness the right word for what I mean?  What word would you use?   I have my answer on this one:  friction.
2. Relationship of Ridership to Density.  Rutherford and Spillar (1998) find that in the range of densities covering most North American urban areas, ridership's relationship to density is an upward curve.  That is, if you control for service quality, if suburb A is twice as dense as suburb B it will generate much more than twice the ridership.  Has anyone done or seen more recent research proving or disproving the same point? 
3. Deterrent Effect of Various Kinds of Delay.  The Transit Capacity and Quality of Service Manual (2nd ed) presents these figures for how much different kinds of waiting time discourage ridership, compared to 1.0 for riding time.  For example, it states that on average, a minute of walking time has the same deterrent effect as 2.2 minutes of riding time.  These numbers are sourced, however, on a wide range of studies dating back to the 1960s.  Has anyone seen anything more recent?
   

   Delay Type:	Walk	Initial Wait	Ride	Wait for Connection
   Minimum	0.8	0.8	1.0	1.1
   Average	2.2	2.1	1.0	2.5
   Maximum	4.4	5.1	1.0	4.4

4. Worker-Driver service.  Do any transit agencies in the developed world run worker-driver service, where a commuter bus is driven by someone actually making the commute, who is hired as a part time employee by the transit agency?  I'm aware of two outer-suburban agencies near Seattle that do this.  Is it commonplace somewhere outside my awareness?  UPDATE:  Just to be clear, I'm not talking about vanpools, which are for particular groups of people by pre-arrangement.  I'm talking about public transit vehicles running along routes, collecting fares, open to anyone.
5. Driver shift start-end locations.  It's universal, in my experience, that driver shifts must end where they began.  The need to return drivers (on the clock) to their point of origin is a large part of the hidden cost of one-way commute express services.  Are there common labor arrangements in the developed world in which a driver clocks out at a different place from where he clocked in?

That headline may sound like a perfect storm of vague and bloodless words, but its meaning is actually pretty forceful. 

I'm looking for examples of policies, often at the level of planning authorities spanning an urban region, that state expected performance outcomes for major investments.  These policies frame the big infrastructure decisions as investments, which implies some risk but also some sense of expected level of return.  The return doesn't have to be to the transit agency's budget, though it certainly can be.  It could also be a return to the tax base or development goals of the city served. 

The purpose of such policies is to push back against purely political impulses in prioritization, including all the many aspects of parochialism that are inseparable from representative democracy.  The policy is polite, but behind the politeness it basically says:  We can't focus on how worthy or victimized or generous your suburb or community or electoral district is, nor do we care what our grandparents promised to your grandparents.  We as a regional infrastructure agency care about outcomes for our region, and we will not make investments that look unlikely to deliver those outcomes.

In my case, I'm interested in major transport infrastructure investments, both highway and transit.

These policies are in early stages of being invented in most of the agencies I'm familiar with, but I want to make sure I'm not missing any inspirational leadership in this area.  Anyone with knowledge of such policies in any urban area, please inform me of them, either in comments or with the email button under my photo. —>

NOTE: This obsolete post is retained to preserve its comments.  The updated post is here.

I'm looking for examples of a successful civic plaza space which is also transit connection point, and where people making connections between transit lines need to walk across the plaza to do that.  In other words, I'm looking for something like this:

(This illustration is of a an idea that was developed for a town center in the metro Vancouver area.  The place as drawn does not exist.  I am looking, by contrast, for something already built and working well.)

The rapid transit station doesn't have to be elevated.  It could be underground or it could even be on the surface.  What I'm after are these key features:

• We are in the high-wage "developed" world.  North America, Europe, wealthy East Asia, Australia/New Zealand, etc.
• Local bus (or streetcar/tram) stops are directly on sides of the square, so that when alighting it feels that you are now "in" or "at" the square.  Ideally, terminating buses stop on the correct side of the street to put you right in the square, not across the street from it.
• People walk across the square to make connections between local transit and rapid transit, so that they become, at least briefly, part of the life of the square.
• A rapid transit stop is probably right at a civic square, though if someone found a square with trams on three sides and lots of people connecting between them, I could work with that.
• The connection being made represents a major node in the transit system, so many riders are making the connection there.  Typically that means that the lines that cross at the square do not cross anywhere else nearby, and/or this is the most logical place to make a connection between those lines. 
• The square is also successful as an urban place, a place where people like to go to have lunch, meet friends, watch people, see street entertainments, etc.  It probably has lots of retail nearby but it is an open public square, not a shopping mall.  It's a place that might be described (to use the well-worn term for Portland's Pioneer Courthouse Square) as the local area's 'living room.'

Anyone who can identify a place that matches these criteria, and point me to some good pictures of it including a picture or diagram that shows the transit circulation clearly, will get, at least:

• a mention in the book (at least in the small print.)
• a shout-out here on the blog
• lunch or dinner on me whenever we're next in the same city

Please forward a link to friends who might also enjoy the challenge.

(Speaking of shout-outs, the above sketch is by Eric Orozco, based on a plan by Hotson Bakker Boniface Haden architects, in which I played a small role.)

UPDATE: Clarifications in response to the first round of suggestions is here.

The book is coming along.  Expect a number of information requests in the next weeks, as I start pinning down details.

I need some nice charts showing ridership per hour of the day for a typical inner-city transit line, and for an outer-suburban one.  Very simple bar or line graphs, covering a weekday, that I can use to illustrate the fact that outer-suburban service tends to be much more peaked and inner-city service busier all across the day.  If you're inside a transit agency and have access to such things, I'd appreciate it. 

Long ago, when all transit data was collected manually by students with clipboards, I did a few studies that watched what happened on a bus or streetcar/tram in normal operation and counted the seconds of delay associated with each of the following factors:

• Being stopped at signals.
• Being stopped or slowed by traffic.
• Being stopped or slowed by accidents.
• Normal-pace boarding and alighting.
• Wheelchair boarding and alighting.
• Conversations with the driver that interrupt boarding/alighting.

These studies are usually done deep inside of transit agencies and often not published (not out of secrecy or shame, but just because they're very technical.)  Have any readers seen or done any studies like this?  I'd like to pull some typical data for a couple of them.