The bilingual blog Straight outta Suburbia / Saliendo de las Afueras is not just an interesting read on Los Angeles issues, but it’s also a good way to practice your Spanish comprehension while reading interesting things. Each post appears in both languages, so you can check the English to see if you understood the Spanish correctly. (And vice versa.) Continue Reading →
Language
As Washington Shivers …
Anyone interested the transit effects of weather will appreciate this press release from WMATA in Washington DC, announcing the suspension of all above-ground transit services in the current snowstorm.
Metrorail trains will stop serving above-ground stations at 1 p.m.
today, Saturday, December 19, due to heavy snowfall that is covering
the electrified third rail, which is situated eight inches above the
ground. The third rail must be clear of snow and ice because it is the
source of electricity that powers the trains. Metro officials believe
that by 1 p.m. the exposed third rail will be covered by snow. All
Metrobus and MetroAccess service also will stop at 1 p.m. because
roadways are quickly becoming impassable.
Think Tanks, Binary Thinking, and “Bus vs Rail”
The Center for Urban Transportation Research (CUTR) at the University of South Florida is under fire in Florida’s legislature. State senator Mike Fasano (R), who chairs the committee overseeing spending by the state Department of Transportation, proposes to cut off funding to the transportation think tank. From the St. Petersburg Times article, it sounds as though Fasano is just looking to cut spending generally, by citing projects that supposedly make CUTR’s work look arcane and unimportant: Continue Reading →
Bus Rapid Transit and the Law of Multiple Intentions
In recent posts on Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) I’ve been dealing with the widespread feeling among US transit advocates that BRT proposals are designed to serve the interests of people who want transit to be cheap to build and don’t care whether it works. But of course, there’s a contrasting stream of intention also built into BRT, well described by commenter Alexander Craghead: Continue Reading →
Bus Rapid Transit Followup
I’ll pull together a response to feedback on the controversial Brisbane busway post in the next few days, but meanwhile, Engineer Scotty asks a good clarifying question:
Part of the problem with BRT [Bus Rapid Transit] acceptance in the US, is [that] most visible BRT systems … tend to look and act like rail-based metros. In the US, we speak of BRT lines–the Silver Line in Boston, the Orange Line in LA, EmX in Eugene, OR–and so forth. The busses which run on BRT are different than the local busses (different branding, different route nomenclature, different fare structures, rapid boarding, longer station spacing, nicer stations, proof-of-payment or turnstiles rather than pay-the-driver-as-you-board)–
Continue Reading →
Urban vs Local?
In his NYT profile of Republican Senator John Thune, David Brooks offered urbanists an especially velvet-gloved insult:
His populism is not angry. … But it’s there, a celebration of the small and local over the big and urban.
This rhetorical device is meant to imply, without quite saying, that “local” is the opposite of “urban,” just as “small” is the opposite of “big.”
Most readers of this blog probably value local government, local achievement, and maybe even locally-grown food. Many of us want cities that feel more like aggregations of localities, places where local experiences — like shops where the clerk remembers your name — are an important counterpoint to the inevitable impersonality of large-scale mechanisms like, say, efficient rapid transit.
But the Republicans have lost the cities. (As New York Governor George Pataki supposedly said to George Bush as they approached the crowds gathered to hear Bush speak at the ruins of the World Trade Center: “See all those people? None of them voted for you!”) So they may well feel that they can use “urban” in a negative sense without much cost.
Keep an eye out for rhetorical uses of “urban” as the opposite of “local.” I bet we’ll hear this trope again.
via www.nytimes.com
Unhelpful Word Watch: Mass Transit
A reader writes with my favorite kind of question: one that contains its own answer. It’s about the term mass transit:
Words I Deleted Today
A client has asked me make the following deletions in a report I’d prepared for them on a public transit planning issue:
“… serious issues of bus access …”
” … to flow through these critical points …”
” … without extreme and circuitous deviations …”
The deleted words are all “emphatic adjectives,” words that mean nothing more than “Hey! This bit here is important!” Serious, critical, and extreme are all-purpose emphatic adjectives, while circuitous becomes emphatic if it’s used redundantly as I did here, “circuitous deviations,” because of course all deviations are circuitous.
Symbolic Logic for Transit Advocates: A Short but Essential Course
Part of our job as informed citizens and voters is to sift through the political claims that we hear and arrive at our own sense of what’s true. I’ve been listening to such claims in the transit business, and sometimes making them, for almost 30 years now. It occurs to me that one of the most important tools for evaluating these claims is something you probably learned in high school math and forgot. (Yes, some of you remembered, but I’m really talking to the ones who forgot. To those of you who just don’t like math, don’t worry if you don’t follow this next bit; just skim ahead to the example. This IS really important.)
Here it is.
Consider a statement of the form “If A is true, then B is true,” [A –> B]
IF that statement is true, then:
- The Converse, [B –> A] is not necessarily true.
- The Inverse [NOT A –> NOT B] is not necessarily true.
- The Contrapositive [NOT B –> NOT A] IS true.
Unhelpful Word Watch: Convenient
A Transport Politic post on US high-speed rail today contains this quotation from Amtrak CEO Joseph Boardman:
With high-speed rail, speed is not the issue. Convenience and trip times are.
What does he mean by convenience? For that matter, what do you mean by convenience? I’ve been hearing this word in conversations about transit for more than 20 years, and in this context, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t mean anything.