A new television commercial in Toronto calls on voters to “vote for candidates who will keep the [Toronto Transit Commission] public.” Continue Reading →
The Next Transport Revolution: Trolley Wire on Every Street?
Richard Gilbert and Anthony Perl. Transport Revolutions: Moving People and Freight without Oil [2nd edition]. Earthscan and New Society Publishers, 2010.
As you’ve probably heard by now, the world is starting to run out of readily-accessible oil, and most rational predictions are that oil prices will continue to rise to reflect the increasing difficulty and risk involved in pursuing new supplies. How will that change our transport system? What kinds of change are needed? What technologies most urgently need research? And who will lead these changes? Continue Reading →
Meta: Secrets of Soaring Readership
Life as a blogger on the TypePad platform includes a daily confrontation with this:
That big bold number is the daily pageviews, since midnight GMT. (It has not occurred to TypePad that perhaps a rolling total of the last 24 hour period might be more useful. Instead, I experience the daily crash to zero at 10 AM Sydney time and then a long, slow climb to some unknown summit.)
But then there’s the line graph. HT has been stable for months now, between 2000 and 3000 pageviews a day except for a weekly trough corresponding to the North American weekend. This regular weekly low is my best signal that many of you are reading this at work.
But yesterday, clearly, some kind of breakthrough! A sudden jump to nearly 4000 pageviews. Was this the well-deserved long-term payoff of weeks of diligent reporting on Frequent Network mapping, and occasional think pieces on big ideas like the perils of average success? Is it about my forays into urban planning topics like pedestrian malls? Does it arise from the long investment this blog has made in trying to clarify technology debates? Does it show the impact of a link from Andrew Sullivan? Does it even have anything to do with my recent US speaking tour and related videos?
No, it was post about new transit-themed toys by Lego, a post that took me less than 10 minutes to prepare as it was mostly a friend’s email.
Am I focusing on the wrong things in life?
Cool but Disturbing Tool Maps U.S. Commutes
Want to know how many people commute from one zipcode to another? Here’s a nice graphical tool by Harry Kao. Input a zipcode and it shows the commute distribution by origin zipcode, from the 2000 Census. I put in 94111, the San Francisco Financial District. Continue Reading →
For Any 6-12 Year Olds Out There …
If you’re still too young to be a transit geek, you might enjoy this news, emailed by a frequent reader:
Lego has recently released an excellent new Public Transport set (see
pictures attached), which my sons and I had lots of fun building and
playing with this last weekend. Continue Reading →
Transit Network Maps: Draw, and Market, Your Own!
Recently I posted on the importance of frequency mapping in network maps. Most transit network maps, I argued, show all the transit lines but make it impossible to sort through them to figure out, quickly, which are likely to be useful. The bottom line: A map that makes all the lines look equally important is as useful as a road map that makes a freeway look just like a dirt road. Continue Reading →
Palestine: Time to Think About Transit?
Can good planning help address the grievous problems of the Palestinian territories, including the challenge of conceiving its patchwork of lands as a viable state? My friend Doug Suisman, a Los Angeles architect in private practice, has been working on the problem for years, through a remarkable project called the Arc. The New York Times profiled it five years ago. Despite all the bad news from Israel and Palestine since then, the work has continued. The idea is to have a plan for the urban structure and transport infrastructure of a Palestinian state, something that’s ready to go when an independent state is created and that can even be part of the run-up to independence. Continue Reading →
Christchurch: An Animated Quake Map
If you want a vivid map of what our friends in Christchurch, New Zealand have been going through, here’s a simple animation of the size, location, and intensity of the ongoing series of earthquakes. It comes by way of friends at NZ in Tranzit, who are also on top of the local transit news.
The Chinese Tunnel-Bus, or Train, or Whatever
Old news, I know.
Chinese designers have come up with an innovative cost-effective public transport system: the tunnel bus.
The remarkable bus straddles two lanes of traffic, allowing cars to drive underneath while it carries up to 1,200 passengers.
It’s environmentally sound too because it runs on electricity, using a state-of-the-art charging system. Called relay charging, the roof of the bus conducts electricity and contacts special charging posts as it moves along.
Engadget links to a video in Chinese explaining the concept, which is pretty clear even if you don’t know Chinese. A trial line is planned in Beijing, so we won’t have to debate it in theory for much longer.
But this is interesting:
It’s cost-effective because there are two ways it could operate: first off, special tracks could be laid into each side of
the road, like a tram.Or secondly, simple coloured lines could be painted onto the road for it to follow automatically on conventional tyres. There’ll be a driver on the bus at all times, though.
I’m not sure how that makes it cost-effective, but it does have the effect of reducing the bus-rail distinction an almost academic quibble.
Either way, this is going to be a large structure resting on narrow wheels. It could be on rubber tires but linked to an optical-guidance system (sensors on the vehicle responding to a painted line on the pavement) and the effect would be the same as if it were on rails: a controlled path with little or no lateral motion.
So is it a train or a bus? Who cares?
Navigation: “Turn Right at the Yellow Shop”?
From the Chicago Breaking Business Report:
Digital mapping company Navteq has introduced a new navigation system
that guides drivers based on the way people naturally give each other
directions, with Chicago as one of the initial cities in the launch.Its new system, called Natural Guidance, gives instructions based on
points of interest and landmarks. For example, instead of traditional
navigation systems that tell drivers to turn after a certain amount of
distance, Natural Guidance instructs users to “turn right after the
yellow shop.”
I hope you like the look of your yellow shop, because if you paint it green, you’ll be destroying your city’s navigation system.
Give me feet, or meters, any day.