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 →
The Transport Politic has a good overview of the recently announced rapid transit plans for San Diego. The plan, in short, is to add only one more line to the region’s light rail system, a long northward extension to the huge University of California San Diego (UCSD) campus. For other corridors in the region, the focus is Bus Rapid Transit. Continue Reading →
Eric Fischer wondered how fast San Francisco’s transit system really was, so he asked the transit agency’s realtime data feed, and drew a picture of the answer:
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
An excellent article on the difficulties of managing transit in San Francisco comes back to the role of the public, and the dangers of seeing “transit riders” as an interest group: Continue Reading →
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.