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Frequency and Freedom on Driverless Rapid Transit

Posted on February 18, 2010 in Automation, Honolulu, Rail Transit, Vancouver

DSCN1552If you’ve seen much of Vancouver on television the last few days, you’ve probably seen a shot of a small train gliding along an elevated guideway.  It’s SkyTrain, the world’s largest system of fully automated (driverless) metros.  Perhaps you’ve ridden driverless trains that shuttle between airport terminals.  SkyTrain is the same principle, at a citywide scale.

Driverless trains raise all kinds of anxieties. Many people like knowing there’s someone in charge on the vehicle, and imagine that this person will be useful in emergencies.  But on most subways, you can only talk to this person by pushing an intercom button.  There’s very little he can do if there’s an emergency in your car other than call for help.  Continue Reading →

New York: Free Student Fares and the Budget Crisis

Posted on February 12, 2010 in Cuts, New York City

Today’s New York Times editorial on New York’s transit funding crisis goes beyond general warnings about the need to fund transit and digs into specifics: Raise bridge tolls, resist election year tax-cutting, hold the line on pay raises, and this:

What it should not mean is doing away with free passes for needy students. Both the state and city will have to contribute more to help pay $214 million a year to help keep these students in school.

Perhaps they read this.

Email of the Week: Should Ridership Data Be Online?

Posted on February 12, 2010 in Philosophy

A contact at Portland’s TriMet (not anyone I’ve named on the blog) writes with an interesting point:

There is an internal TriMet web site, accessible to all TriMet employees, including drivers and mechanics, that has a wealth of information, such as budgets, ridership, etc. While all of this could potentially be misinterpreted, it seems to me that it should all be available to the public in a section of the public web site. I shouldn’t have to feel sneaky when I provide you with extracts from this material.

Continue Reading →

Vancouver: An Olympic Urbanist Preview

Posted on February 12, 2010 in Urban Structure, Vancouver

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Over the next two weeks, we’ll see a lot of Vancouver, one of the most remarkable achievements in 20th Century urbanism. If you’re going to promote transit anywhere, especially in North America or Australasia, it’s an important city to know about.

As the Olympic Winter Games run, I’ll do a series of posts on Vancouver transit issues (interspersed with some Sydney news that will break over the weekend).  I’ll rely on my own experience living and working there in 2005-6, my annual visits since then, and the insights of my former colleagues. But my single best source is probably my friend Gordon Price, a former city councilman and frequent speaker on urbanist issues around the world.  His friendly blog Price Tags is my first bookmark for Vancouver’s news on sustainable transport and urban design.  (Just today, for example, he posted a link to a spectacular aerial montage, a bit like Google Street View from an altitude of 500m or so.  It’s a great way to explore the city.)

What’s special about Vancouver?  It’s a new dense city, in North America. Continue Reading →

Privatized Transit and (or vs.) The Public Good

Posted on February 5, 2010 in Privatization

Tony Judt has a fascinating piece at New York Review of Books on the ideal of social democracy manifested by most European governments: a democratic state with relatively high levels of taxes and government services.  Writing from a leftist perspective, he worries about the recent rise of economic analysis as a primary basis for government decisions. This trend, which he traces to Margaret Thatcher, has shaped the thinking of a generation of bureaucrats, not just in Britain but throughout the Commonwealth and also in parts of Continental Europe.  It’s almost universal in the British-derived cultures of Australia and New Zealand, where I work now.  Here, it often seems an idea about transit counts for nothing if it can’t be expressed in terms of “Cost Benefit Evaluation” (CBE) and “Key Performance Indicators” (KPI).   Continue Reading →

Transit Advertising and Transit Self-Esteem

Posted on February 5, 2010 in Marketing, On-Time Performance, Philosophy, Sydney

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This Air New Zealand ad, on a bus shelter in Sydney, raises the issue of transit self-esteem.   “$100 says the bus won’t be late,” it says, then, in much smaller print: “Looks like you win.”

Should transit agencies accept advertising that demeans their service?

Advertisers are often tempted to do exactly that, especially when selling vacations or other forms of escape from the everyday.  The bus is both a profitable site of advertising and an irresistible metaphor for the tedious life.  If you imagine your transport mode as a romantic partner, the bus in mixed traffic is the worst of both worlds: neither sexy nor capable of commitment.  When advertising on a bus, it’s not surprising that advertisers find ways to play on that. Continue Reading →

Technology Obsessions in the U.S. National Transit Database

Posted on February 2, 2010 in General

The US National Transit Database (NTD) is out for 2008! (Yes, a one year lag counts as fast in this business.)  For those of you who aren’t compulsively drawn to spreadsheets, Cap’n Transit tries to get to the bottom of farebox recovery, the percentage of operating costs paid by fares.

Farebox Recovery RatioAgencies
70-200%Lincoln Tunnel buses, inclined planes, Hudson River ferries, SEPTA [Philadelphia] trolleybuses
40-69%Big city rail, college town buses
30-39%Big city bus and light rail
0.1-29%Small and medium city bus and light rail, plus assorted boondoggles
0Free services

via capntransit.blogspot.com Continue Reading →

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