One of the world’s most famous continuous loops is finally reaching an endpoint. The London Underground’s Circle Line, which has long attracted tourists with its simplicity but bedeviled its operators with lack of rest, is to be broken apart into a “tadpole” shape, with trains leaving the circle at Paddington, via a spur of the current Hammersmith & City Line, to end at Hammersmith. Continue Reading →
Rail Transit
Bus-Rail Debates in a Beautiful Abstract City, and in Los Angeles
On a recent post, commenter Pantheon laid out the core idea that explains why I cannot be a full-time rail booster, even though I love riding trains as much as anyone:
The problem can be posed in the abstract in the following way. Let’s
say we have a city with 20 neighbourhoods, A-T. Our city has a big
deficit in transit infrastructure, and limited resources for redressing
it. We have X dollars to build infrastructure, which is enough to do
one of the following things:
Continue Reading →
Los Angeles: Reader Feedback on the Gold Line
My attempt at a feel-good post on the opening of the East Los Angeles Gold Line light rail extension attracted a lot of comment from locals who don’t feel so good about it. Continue Reading →
Los Angeles: Gold Line Opens; “Planners” Blamed
Congratulations to Los Angeles on today’s opening of the Gold Line light rail extension, which runs from Union Station through several historically neglected suburbs to East Los Angeles, and will probably someday go further.
More precisely, congratulations to every Angeleno except Ari B.Bloomekatz of the Los Angeles Times, who wrote this:
Why is the Gold Line not a subway?
From the beginning, residents and politicians on the Eastside pushed for the Gold Line extension to be built completely underground. In the end, transportation planners decided to make a roughly 1.7-mile portion of the Gold Line a subway — the part that runs underneath Boyle Heights. The majority of the route runs above ground.
Karlsruhe: A Ride on the “Tram-Trains”
Sparked in part by a suggestion from a reader, I spent two days last month in Karlsruhe, a pleasant but not touristed small city in the southwest of Germany. In rail transit circles, Karlsruhe is famous for inventing “tram-trains,” a vehicle and service type that can operate in the street as a streetcar/tram, but can also go onto standard railway lines, often shared with intercity passenger rail and freight, to go longer distances into the surrounding suburbs. This means that the service you board in your outer suburb can flow right into the city’s core streetcar network, and get you closer to your inner-city destination than the train station would be; thus saving you from having to make a connection.
Paris: Do We Have Enough Logos Yet?
A lot has improved about transit in Paris since I was last there in 1991, and certainly since I lived there in 1986. But I’m having trouble finding any positive angle on the partial re-branding of the crucial commuter rail and long-distance metro service, the RER. Because Paris does everything on such an operatic scale, the new RER brands may offer a useful parable about the perils of agency-centered communications, especially in an era where European public transit operating companies are expected to act like private businesses. Continue Reading →
Viaduct Love in Berlin
The current generation of urban designers may like to complain about NIMBYs, but urban designers and NIMBYs can be counted on to agree on one thing: Elevated transportation infrastructure is a bad thing in an urban setting. Urban design today focuses on activating the ground plane and maintaining its visual connection to the sky. Even pedestrian bridges are out of fashion, while a new continuous elevated structure would be hard sell in the urban core of almost any major city. The Seattle Monorail Project (1996-2005) proposed a very thin elevated structure, but even this was a flashpoint of controversy when it got close to existing buildings.
It may be true that we don’t know how to build viaducts anymore and that the freeway era has traumatized a whole generation into reacting badly to absolutely anything new up in the air. And I’m not sure that’s a bad thing, but …
But before we decide for sure, take a walk with me along Berlin’s Stadtbahn.
Berlin’s New Micro-Subway: A Short Architectural Tour
Earlier this year, Berlin’s U-Bahn opened its newest segment of subway, a 1.1 mile three-station line connecting the main rail station to the Brandenburg Gate. It’s temporarily called the U55, but it will ultimately become part of the expanded U5 (see network map here). From the Gate, the line will continue east under Unter den Linden, Berlin’s main processional boulevard, to Alexanderplatz, the former East Berlin downtown and one of Berlin’s most important hubs. (From there it will continue to the eastern suburbs as the U5 that already exists.) This is such an important segment for Berlin, both practically and symbolically, that it´s remarkable it´s only now being built. (The Transport Politic reviewed the political history here.)
Can Rapid Transit Work Along Freeways?
Lately there’s been a groundswell of talk among transit advocates about the need to stop building rapid transit along freeways. To honor the imminent opening of Portland’s Green Line, which runs mostly along the east side of that city’s I-205 freeway, I thought I’d weigh in on this a little, with some relevant pictures fresh from Berlin.
Prague and San Francisco: On Communist vs Capitalist Modernism
In November 1973, a new subway station opened whose walls looked like this:
Just six months later, on the other side of the Iron Curtain, a subway station opened whose walls looked like this:
Is there any essential difference between communist and capitalist modernism?