Do your city’s political leaders understand what funding sources people would support if they knew what they were buying? A few weeks ago, the Source (a blog by the Los Angeles transit agency Metro) reported on a survey showing that current riders would pay 50c more in fares for a doubling of their frequency of service. This isn’t as encouraging as it sounds, because a doubling of frequency, even with significant ridership increases as a result, will cost a lot more than 50 cents per new rider. But it’s a useful soundbite. These questions, broadly called “willingness to pay” questions, need to be asked more, and more probingly. Continue Reading →
New Media and Transit Complaints
So you just had a bad transit experience. A driver was rude to you. Your bus was early so you missed it. Your bus was late and missed the train connection. Or even worse: your bus is scheduled to miss the train connection.
Over at Planning Pool, (via Streetsblog) they’re suggesting a new way to express your frustration in real time, on Twitter. Continue Reading →
Seattle Suburbs: The Silence of Sundays
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.
Children on Transit: A Personal Note
A few days back, frequent commenter Engineer Scotty did a much discussed guest post on the problems of travelling with small children on transit. He suggested, I thought, a reasonable range of accommodations that transit agencies should make (many of them good things to do anyway) and also talked through some things the parent can do to make the situation easier.
Scotty has twins, so he often drives a double-wide stroller/pram. To people who don’t like the company of small children, a double-wide pram seems to evoke the same emotions that a Hummer evokes in car-haters like myself. It seems huge, excessive, “in your face.” As Scotty observes, it can get on a bus in pretty much the way a wheelchair does, but like a wheelchair it takes a lot of space and demands some accommodation from other passengers if the bus is crowded.
It’s been interesting to watch this post’s reception for several reasons. First of all, a lot of this blog is about explaining concepts that not everyone has thought about, and on which many don’t have a strongly-held view. But when the subject is children on transit, everyone’s interested and everyone has an opinion. Scotty’s post was featured by Streetsblog, and it drove my traffic to a level not seen since Portland shock-blogger Jack Bogdanski attacked me for suggesting he pay the real price of parking in downtown Portland. Continue Reading →
Sydney: Grid Networks for Gridless Cities
Whenever I talk about the value of grid networks, as I did here, someone always says: But my city isn’t a grid. For example, Sydney, where I live now, is about as ungridlike a city as you’ll encounter. In fact, there’s no large system of order in Sydney’s road network at all. Some roads follow what were once Aboriginal tracks, but mostly it just grew, one bit at a time, an accretion of millions of short-term decisions.
Guest Post: Families and Children on Transit
This guest post is by EngineerScotty, a software engineer and part-time transportation geek from the Portland, Oregon area. He is a frequent commenter here on Human Transit.
I’m a father of several small children, including twin boys (now four years old). [Not those in the picture — JW] Using public transit provides parents with several challenges not faced by childless passengers; and conversely, families with children provide transit authorities with challenges–and opportunities–that are unique. In a recent thread on PortlandTransport.com, one poster, a dedicated urbanist with a bit of a temper, made it clear to myself and other parents that he considered kids–our “screaming brats” as he put it–unwelcome on transit. Continue Reading →
Vancouver: Olympic Transit Payoffs
Why should a growing city with high ambitions for sustainability host a big blockbuster like the Olympics, with all the risk and nuisance that it entails?
So that everyone can see exceptional transit ridership, and exceptional volumes of pedestrians, and exceptional limitations on private car traffic, and can ask: “What if that were normal?”
vancouver: the great broadway debate
The big rail transit debate in Vancouver at the moment concerns Broadway. You might call it Vancouver’s Wilshire Boulevard: not always a beautiful street but a very important one. It’s the direct line east from the University of British Columbia at the west end of the city, and goes through a major office core, including Vancouver City Hall, just south of downtown proper. It’s the busiest east-west arterial in the entire city and the site of one of the busiest bus lines in North America, the 99. It has everything you need for successful rail transit, except consensus. Here again is the City of Vancouver’s transit network, with the Broadway corridor in dark orange.
vancouver: the almost perfect grid
In the last post, which explains why grids are such an efficient structure for transit, I mentioned that Vancouver has one of the best transit geographies I’ve ever encountered. Here’s what I mean.
A grid pattern of arterial streets covers almost all of Vancouver. Most of the time, parallel major streets are spaced about every 800-1000m apart, and since a comfortable walking distance is about half that, this spacing is perfect for efficient transit. Continue Reading →
The Power and Pleasure of Grids
Why do transit planners love grids? Now and then you’ll even hear one muttering about “grid integrity” or “completing the grid.” What are they talking about?
Suppose you’re designing an ideal transit system for a fairly dense city where there are many activity centers, not just one big downtown. In fact, you don’t want to give preferential treatment to any point in the city. Instead, you want people to be able to travel from literally anywhere to anywhere else by a reasonably direct path, at a high frequency. Everybody would really like a frequent service from their home to everywhere they ever go, which is pretty much what a private car is. But money isn’t infinite, so the system has to deliver its outcome efficiently, with the minimum possible cost per rider. What would such a system look like? Continue Reading →