As cycling becomes more and more popular, how should transit planning respond? I’ve suggested before that better integration of cycling can be crucial to expanding the reach of rapid transit, and possibly eliminating some of the need for less efficient local-stop transit. That post also attracted great comments from experienced bike+transit riders hammering out the details.
But the details of whether and how much this can work vary a lot from one city to another. Continue Reading →
Community Transit, which serves most of the northern suburbs of Seattle, is shutting down completely on Sundays. This wouldn’t be unusual in a small-city transit system, but CT’s service area (most of Snohomish County) is a big suburban expanse with about half a million people. It has enough transit demand to support a low-end Bus Rapid Transit line, called Swift, which will presumably not run on Sundays either.
This is a fairly dramatic step by North American standards. Local transit in suburban areas generally appeals to people with few choices, but many, many of these people work in low-wage jobs in the service sector, such as restaurants and big-box retail. These business are open seven days a week and often are busiest on weekends, so most of their employees have to work some weekend shifts. A transit system that doesn’t run on Sundays will no longer be useful to these people. Based on what I’ve seen elsewhere, most of them will find other arrangements; CT is likely to lose them on all five days a week that they travel, not just Sunday. Some, those without any good transport options, may lose their jobs.
I hope CT or some other local government researches what happens to these riders when Sunday service ends. The best approach might be to survey the Sunday riders before the service stops, asking them for follow-up contacts so that they can be interviewed again a few months in the future. This would not only provide good data for other agencies facing the need to cut service, but would also be a nice way for the agency to convey some concern for the well-being of these customers.
My post on the strategic value of chokepoints, using the example of chokepoint-rich Seattle, led to an interesting comment thread at the Seattle Transit Blog. As often happens, discussion quickly turned to my references to rail and Bus Rapid Transit, as readers argued over whether my real agenda was to advance one of those modes.
As regular readers will know, it’s rarely that simple. But chokepoints do point to an advantage for Bus Rapid Transit if you’re trying to do things cheaply. That advantage is that a chokepoint that affects private vehicle traffic is effectively a kind of traffic meter. In our* work for Seattle Dept. of Transportation in the mid 00s, for example, we noticed that congestion was actually worse at the chokepoints around the edges of downtown than right in the center of downtown. The chokepoints were restricting the rate of flow of vehicles so that they couldn’t congest the core, exactly the way a system of freeway ramp meters can limit congestion on a freeway. Continue Reading →
In December, Alex Steffen wrote a provocative article at Worldchanging proposing that Seattle aim to become North America’s first carbon-neutral city. I’m not an expert on carbon-neutrality as a whole, but I can certainly comment on the transport dimensions of it. Here are some reasons to bet on Seattle, in particular, as a place that might get closer to carbon-neutrality in transportation than most other North American cities. Ultimately, all of these are about geography. Continue Reading →
If you think on-street Bus Rapid Transit can never be acceptable, have a look at the new “Swift” project in Snohomish County, the suburban area north of Seattle. The local agency, Community Transit, has a slick but very informative presentation, including a great video, here. People who think BRT can never be good transit really need to watch the video. It’s definitely a sales pitch, but it gives a good overview of the system and shows some of why BRT projects have such appeal, especially in outer-suburban areas where densities don’t support rail, at least not yet. Continue Reading →
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.)
It’s a big day for streetcars. Portland has released its draft Streetcar System Concept Plan, an ambitious vision for extending the city’s popular downtown streetcar all over the city. There are similar plans underway in Seattle, Minneapolis, and many other cities.
Seattle Transit Blog reported some grief from the Rainier Valley area in southeast Seattle, regarding King County Metro’s proposed new bus route structure to accompany the opening of Sound Transit’s light rail line. The issue looks like a good opportunity to look at the whole question of very short routes, or “circulators.”