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Children on Transit: A Personal Note

Posted on March 5, 2010 in Children, Philosophy

Kids_on___bwayA few days back, frequent commenter Engineer Scotty did a much discussed guest post on the problems of travelling with small children on transit.  He suggested, I thought, a reasonable range of accommodations that transit agencies should make (many of them good things to do anyway) and also talked through some things the parent can do to make the situation easier.

Scotty has twins, so he often drives a double-wide stroller/pram.  To people who don’t like the company of small children, a double-wide pram seems to evoke the same emotions that a Hummer evokes in car-haters like myself.  It seems huge, excessive, “in your face.”  As Scotty observes, it can get on a bus in pretty much the way a wheelchair does, but like a wheelchair it takes a lot of space and demands some accommodation from other passengers if the bus is crowded.

It’s been interesting to watch this post’s reception for several reasons.  First of all, a lot of this blog is about explaining concepts that not everyone has thought about, and on which many don’t have a strongly-held view.   But when the subject is children on transit, everyone’s interested and everyone has an opinion.  Scotty’s post was featured by Streetsblog, and it drove my traffic to a level not seen since Portland shock-blogger Jack Bogdanski attacked me for suggesting he pay the real price of parking in downtown Portland.   Continue Reading →

The Power and Pleasure of Grids

Posted on February 23, 2010 in Basics, Frequent Networks, Los Angeles, Paris, Philosophy, San Francisco, Sydney, Urban Structure

Why do transit planners love grids?  Now and then you’ll even hear one muttering about “grid integrity” or “completing the grid.”  What are they talking about?

Suppose you’re designing an ideal transit system for a fairly dense city where there are many activity centers, not just one big downtown.  In fact, you don’t want to give preferential treatment to any point in the city.  Instead, you want people to be able to travel from literally anywhere to anywhere else by a reasonably direct path, at a high frequency.  Everybody would really like a frequent service from their home to everywhere they ever go, which is pretty much what a private car is.  But money isn’t infinite, so the system has to deliver its outcome efficiently, with the minimum possible cost per rider. What would such a system look like? Continue Reading →

Email of the Week: Should Ridership Data Be Online?

Posted on February 12, 2010 in Philosophy

A contact at Portland’s TriMet (not anyone I’ve named on the blog) writes with an interesting point:

There is an internal TriMet web site, accessible to all TriMet employees, including drivers and mechanics, that has a wealth of information, such as budgets, ridership, etc. While all of this could potentially be misinterpreted, it seems to me that it should all be available to the public in a section of the public web site. I shouldn’t have to feel sneaky when I provide you with extracts from this material.

Continue Reading →

Transit Advertising and Transit Self-Esteem

Posted on February 5, 2010 in Marketing, On-Time Performance, Philosophy, Sydney

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This Air New Zealand ad, on a bus shelter in Sydney, raises the issue of transit self-esteem.   “$100 says the bus won’t be late,” it says, then, in much smaller print: “Looks like you win.”

Should transit agencies accept advertising that demeans their service?

Advertisers are often tempted to do exactly that, especially when selling vacations or other forms of escape from the everyday.  The bus is both a profitable site of advertising and an irresistible metaphor for the tedious life.  If you imagine your transport mode as a romantic partner, the bus in mixed traffic is the worst of both worlds: neither sexy nor capable of commitment.  When advertising on a bus, it’s not surprising that advertisers find ways to play on that. Continue Reading →

On Incompleteness (of Networks, of Life …)

Posted on February 1, 2010 in Philosophy, Urban Structure

Reader Russell Bozian thinks he spies a theme coursing through recent posts.

Will partially built houses ever be energy efficient? Ones where the walls are up, but the roof has not been put on yet? If you don’t qualify for a full home loan, will banks even lend you half the money you need to build a house? Will the banks figure that you can at least have half a good life, living in a house with walls but no roof? …

Jarrett, your original post wonders out loud why Portland can spend tens of millions on transit and not, in 2010, see a much higher percentage of people commuting to work on public transport. But at the present build rate, won’t it take at least until 2050 before Portland has a comprehensive and ubiquitous public transport network, such as we see in Manhattan? Why do we starve public transport of the money it needs to finish a decent network of routes, and then pause to criticize its incomplete performance statistics? Would we ponder why the waterworks is not delivering much water to our faucets, if we only gave them enough money and right of way for each water line to stop 100 feet short of our houses?
Continue Reading →

Three Paths to a Low-Car City

Posted on January 20, 2010 in Philosophy, Portland, Urban Structure

If you want to live in a city with fewer cars, how do you get there?  What do low-car cities have in common?  Anything?  Or are there in fact different ways to reach low car-dependence, demonstrated by very different cities achieving the same high scores?

All these questions came to mind as I perused Wikipedia’s helpful list of the US cities over 100,000 population with the most zero-car households (thanks to commenter Alon Levy).  I find the list so interesting that I’m just going to copy all of it here, then add some thoughts at the end.   The figure given for each city is the percentage of households that do not own a car. Continue Reading →

A Visit From the Loyal Opposition

Posted on January 15, 2010 in Meta, Philosophy, Urban Structure

Very interesting and civil comment threads have grown on the last several posts.  Comment threads, of course, have a tendency to start with the post’s topic but then turn into conversations among the commenters, often leading far from the source.  As long as everyone’s civil, I don’t worry about that much.  I’ve learned not to treat the comment count as a measure of my relevance.

But I do want to note the efforts of commenter Watson, who lucidly argued for parking subsidies, sprawl land use patterns, etc. on the this recent post.  The resulting comment thread is worth a read.  On the subject of whether downtown Portland all-day parking rates should be higher, he began:

Be careful what you wish for. In the short-term, a sharp increase in central city parking prices might induce a significant shift from autos to transit. But over the long-term, the primary effect may be to drive businesses and people out of the city and into the suburbs where land is cheaper and parking can be provided at lower cost.

Continue Reading →

Portland: A Challenging Chart

Posted on January 9, 2010 in Mobility, Philosophy, Portland

Portland is supposed to be one of the US’s great transit success stories.  Is it still?  Do we know what it’s achieving?  Do we know how to measure it?

A couple of months ago, Portland reader Adrian Lawson pointed me to an Oregon Catalyst article ridiculing the Portland Metro goal of tripling non-auto mode share by 2035.  The author, John Charles, Jr., is the CEO of the Cascade Policy Institute, a conservative Oregon think tank that opposes Oregon’s land use planning system and generally favors roads over transit, so this is not a surprising view. Continue Reading →

San Francisco: Those Service Cuts Were Fun! Let’s (not) Do It Again!

Posted on January 8, 2010 in Cuts, Philosophy, San Francisco

In posts here and here (with leftovers here), I praised the way San Francisco MTA crafted the budget-driven service cuts that went into effect last month. By deleting whole lines and line segments that had alternative services nearby, they managed to reduce service without reducing many people’s abundant access. So the implementation went fairly well.

Unfortunately, it looks like more cuts will be needed in 2010, made worse by Governor Schwarzenegger’s raids on state transit funding. So it’s understandable but distressing to hear the MTA Board’s conversation going along these lines: Continue Reading →

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