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 →
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 →
I told you I thought Vancouver would be lucky. From Vancouver reader Meredith Botta:
We have had spectacular weather over the past few days, cold enough at night to preserve the snow (and to make new snow) at the outdoor Olympic venues, and warm, sunny and clear in the day.
Trust me, you have to have lived through a Vancouver winter to understand how miraculous this is. Gordon Price even caught some cherries blooming, a good month ahead of schedule. Meredith goes on:
The feeling downtown amongst the crowds is unbelievable …. lots of smiles punctuating the rainbow of nationalities everywhere. I even bumped into a quartet of singing Russian women in a crowded Canada Line train the other day. TransLink announced today that they hit a new record with 1.7 million trips made in one day, yesterday. Ridership is about evenly split between rail and buses, with SkyTrain exceeding 600,000 / day for the first time in its history. I hope the politicians are paying attention.
I’m keenly aware of the irony of having praised Vancouver’s driverless metro on the very day that Sydney’s driverless metro proposal was declared dead by the city’s main newspaper. I’m also aware that as part of the team that authored the Independent Inquiry (now widely called the Christie Report) which recommends postponing Sydney’s metro project, I could be misunderstood as saying that what’s good enough for Vancouver isn’t good enough for Sydney. Continue Reading →
If 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 →
Updated Sep 2020.
Every week or two, I get an email asking me how to get into the transit planning business. I’m aware of these five fairly common paths, none of which I took myself: Continue Reading →
For the last four months, I’ve been part of a team looking at the big-picture problems of public transport in Sydney, sponsored but not controlled by the city’s main newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald. We released the draft report today, so I can finally talk about it. Continue Reading →
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.
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.
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 →