Hello from Berlin, where I chanced to be in town for one of the larger transit meltdowns I’ve seen. And I’ve seen a few!
New York City
Why Isn’t Through-Routing More Common?
A reader asks:
[Alon Levy’s] post on The Transport Politic about through-routing commuter rail in New York brought up a question I’ve had for several years regarding transit systems. Why isn’t through-routing more common? This applies to rail, BRT, regular bus, etc. It seems that through-routing all or most of a city’s lines via a central transit center provides all the benefits of the “hub-and-spoke” model but also eliminates the need for transfers for a significant minority of people. Is there a downside or cost that isn’t apparent at first?
How Paris is Like Los Angeles (via New York)
Alon Levy, guest-writing at The Transport Politic, recently did a great piece proposing that the New York region’s commuter rail lines, which currently all terminate in Manhattan, should be connected to each other so that trains would flow through, for example, from Long Island to New Jersey and back. The inspiration, of course, is the Paris RER, a system in which commuter rail lines on opposite sides of Paris flow across the city into each other. Because all these commuter trains, merged into a common city segment, add up to reasonably high frequency, the RER also serves as an “extra-rapid metro” connecting major centres across the city with trips making just a few stops. Alon’s plan (part one, part two) is a great read, as is Cap’n Transit’s response to it.
Such a system would be wonderful if it existed today. Commutes from Long Island to New Jersey would certainly be much easier, and it would also be great to get the space-consuming and time-consuming end-of-line functions out of the core.
Rail Rapid Transit Maps, to Scale
Neil Freeman recently posted a great collection of rail rapid transit maps, all drawn to scale, and all at the same scale. The image at right, of course, is New York City,
He calls them subway maps, but of course that term suggests that the service is all underground, which few “subway” systems are. What matters is that they’re rapid transit. In this case, they’re specifically rail rapid transit, which is why Staten Island’s rail line in the lower left appears disconnected from the rest. In reality, it’s just connected by rapid transit of a different mode: the Staten Island Ferry.
(By “rapid transit” this blog always means transit services that run frequently all day in an exclusive right of way with widely spaced stations — linking centers to each other, for example, rather than providing coverage to every point on the line as local-stop services do.)