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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 →

Can We Cycle the “Last Mile”?

Posted on April 13, 2010 in General

Max Utility asks, in a comment:

I would be interested to see your take on how transit systems can better integrate bicycles into their plans to solve ‘last mile’ issues. Even on systems I’ve used that are relatively welcoming to bikes (see Berlin) it always appears to be something of an after thought and the awkwardness seems to discourage multi-modal riders.

Since I am primarily a bicycle advocate, I’m also interested to hear any thoughts on how the bicycle advocacy groups could work better with transit system operators to improve both sets of infrastructure since they do seem to be mutually supporting when properly integrated.

Continue Reading →

Human Transit: The First Year

Posted on April 9, 2010 in Meta

Well, my Welcome and Manifesto post is dated 10 April 2009, so I’ve been doing this for a year.

I started this blog to provide a source of commentary about transit planning issues based on two decades of experience in that business.  I had no idea whether the blogosphere wanted such a thing.  I wasn’t sure where it would lead.  I wasn’t sure who the audience would turn out to be. Continue Reading →

Portland: The Lure of the Unmeasurable

Posted on April 4, 2010 in General

PC280005 A while back, Aaron Renn at the Urbanophile did an interesting post on Portland.  Anyone who loves the city will find it engaging and challenging, as I did, and I wanted to expand on a comment I made there at the time.  (I lived there from 1969 to 1980 and was later based there as a transit planning consultant, 1994-2003.)

Comparing Portland to his hometown, Indianapolis, he notices that the two cities score about the same on many metrics — job growth, domestic in-migration, GDP, etc. — even though Portland is a nationally renowned achievement in urban planning and lifestyle while Indianapolis is a pretty ordinary Midwestern city surrounded by lots of sprawl.  The core of his observation is in this quotation from Alissa Walker at Good: Continue Reading →

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