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Line Numbering: Geek Fetish or Crucial Messaging?

Posted on May 3, 2010 in Basics, Las Vegas, Philosophy, San Francisco

Commenter Mike recently laid out a nice explanation of the line numbering system in Aachen, Germany, and then asked, fatefully:

How do professionals assign line numbers?

The answer is:  Much as geeky amateurs do, when drawing imaginary networks.  It’s a process of (1) imagining beautiful systems of order, and (2) willing them in to being.  Unfortunately, real-world professionals have to proceed through the additional steps of (3) clashing with proponents of competing systems, (4) enduring the derision and sabotage of anarchists, and finally (5) resigning to a messy outcome where only traces of beauty remain, visible “between the lines” so to speak, for those still capable of enchantment. Continue Reading →

Streetcars and Spontaneity

Posted on April 30, 2010 in Light Rail, Mobility, Rail Transit, Streetcars (Trams), Vancouver

The comments on Is Speed Obsolete? — my post on Professor Patrick Condon’s thesis that slow streetcars are better than rapid transit — are a gold mine of perspectives and insights.  I could spin a month of posts out of them.

Let’s start with this one, from Adrian, in response to my claim that slow transit competes more with walking and cycling, while fast
transit competes more with cars.  Continue Reading →

Guest Post: Samuel Scheib on Parking, the Field of Nightmares

Posted on April 24, 2010 in Guest Posts, Parking, Urban Structure

Samuel Scheib is the senior planner at StarMetro (Tallahassee, Florida) and the editor of Trip Planner Magazine: the art and science
of transit.  He holds a master’s degree in planning from Florida State University, as a Transit Fellow. 

Parking was one of the earliest problems associated with the widespread automobile ownership that began in the 1910s and 1920s; having a place to leave cars—the terminal capacity—is as important to the transportation system as the carriageway that moves them.  By the 1930s, urban streets were filled with cars that were driving in circles searching for curb parking.  The accepted solution to this congestion problem was off-street parking.
Soon, cities around the United States had enshrined off-street parking requirements in their zoning laws.  According to Donald Shoup (The High
Cost of Free Parking) a 1946 survey found that only 17% of the cities in the study had zoned parking requirements; just five years later that percentage was 76.  Today free, unlimited parking is the expectation for most drivers:  parking is free for 99% of all automobile trips in the U.S. Continue Reading →

Is Speed Obsolete?

Posted on April 21, 2010 in Philosophy, Rail Transit, Streetcars (Trams), Vancouver

For a while now, a strain of urbanist thought has been asking:  Should we want transit to be slower?

That, broadly speaking, is the question raised by Professor Patrick M. Condon at the University of British Columbia (UBC).  Condon heads the Design Centre for Sustainability inside UBC’s Department of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, and is the author of the very useful book Design Charrettes for Sustainable Communities.  In his 2008 paper “The Case for the Tram: Learning from Portland,” he explicitly states a radical idea that many urban planners are thinking about, but that not many of them say in public.  He suggests that the whole idea of moving large volumes of people relatively quickly across an urban region, as “rapid transit” systems do, is problematic or obsolete: Continue Reading →

Should We Plan Transit for “Bikeability”?

Posted on April 20, 2010 in Cycling, Portland, Seattle, Urban Structure

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 →

Applying Highway Concepts to Transit

Posted on April 16, 2010 in General

One of this blog’s recurrent themes is that we need to notice when people are thinking about transit as though it worked just like roads and cars.  Our transportation bureaucracies are full of people who’ve been trained to understand traffic, and who sometimes struggle to extend that mental framework to transit.  One of the most important American “bibles” on public transit, the Transit Capacity and Quality of Service Manual, was explicitly designed to imitate the structure and style of the AASHTO Highway Capacity Manual, because it saw traffic experts as one of its key audiences. Continue Reading →

Honolulu: Grand Themes from the Rail Transit Wars

Posted on April 15, 2010 in Honolulu, Portland, Rail Transit, Streetcars (Trams)

Honolulu-Rail-Map

Eight months ago, a freelance reporter asked for my views on the emerging argument over Honolulu’s proposed rail transit line, which would stretch most of the length of the populated southern shore, from west of Pearl Harbor through downtown to Ala Moana Center on the edge of Waikiki.  The Transport Politic has covered the background here and here and here.  A good blog on the subject is here. Continue Reading →

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