Human Transit

Portland: A Challenging Chart

Posted on January 9, 2010 in Mobility, Philosophy, Portland

Portland is supposed to be one of the US’s great transit success stories. Is it still? Do we know what it’s achieving? Do we know how to measure it?

A couple of months ago, Portland reader Adrian Lawson pointed me to an Oregon Catalyst article ridiculing the Portland Metro goal of tripling non-auto mode share by 2035. The author, John Charles, Jr., is the CEO of the Cascade Policy Institute, a conservative Oregon think tank that opposes Oregon’s land use planning system and generally favors roads over transit, so this is not a surprising view. Continue Reading →

San Francisco: Those Service Cuts Were Fun! Let’s (not) Do It Again!

Posted on January 8, 2010 in Cuts, Philosophy, San Francisco

In posts here and here (with leftovers here), I praised the way San Francisco MTA crafted the budget-driven service cuts that went into effect last month. By deleting whole lines and line segments that had alternative services nearby, they managed to reduce service without reducing many people’s abundant access. So the implementation went fairly well.

Unfortunately, it looks like more cuts will be needed in 2010, made worse by Governor Schwarzenegger’s raids on state transit funding. So it’s understandable but distressing to hear the MTA Board’s conversation going along these lines: Continue Reading →

Chokepoints as Traffic Meters and Transit Opportunities

Posted on January 6, 2010 in Bus Rapid Transit, Seattle

My post on the strategic value of chokepoints, using the example of chokepoint-rich Seattle, led to an interesting comment thread at the Seattle Transit Blog. As often happens, discussion quickly turned to my references to rail and Bus Rapid Transit, as readers argued over whether my real agenda was to advance one of those modes.

As regular readers will know, it’s rarely that simple. But chokepoints do point to an advantage for Bus Rapid Transit if you’re trying to do things cheaply. That advantage is that a chokepoint that affects private vehicle traffic is effectively a kind of traffic meter. In our* work for Seattle Dept. of Transportation in the mid 00s, for example, we noticed that congestion was actually worse at the chokepoints around the edges of downtown than right in the center of downtown. The chokepoints were restricting the rate of flow of vehicles so that they couldn’t congest the core, exactly the way a system of freeway ramp meters can limit congestion on a freeway. Continue Reading →

Leadership from Columbus: A Great Transit Advocacy Website

Posted on January 5, 2010 in Basics, Columbus, Stop Spacing

As someone who designs transit networks for a living, it’s often lonely trying to promote good network design. When changing services to create a better network, everyone who is negatively impacted complains at once, while those who would benefit (including people who care about the efficiency and usability of their city as a whole) tend not to tune in. So the political process of getting change approved is often unpleasant to say the least.

It would help if every city had advocates promoting basic principles of efficient network design. For a good example of what this might look like, have a look at the Columbus Bus Rapid Transit Plan. This appears to be the work of a local advocate who signs comments as “John,” but like Shakespeare he seems to have completely submerged his identity under his work. I can’t find out anything else about him, nor does he have an obvious place to get feedback. Continue Reading →

Chokepoints for Effective Transit: The Example of Seattle

Posted on January 2, 2010 in Basics, Seattle, Urban Structure

In December, Alex Steffen wrote a provocative article at Worldchanging proposing that Seattle aim to become North America’s first carbon-neutral city. I’m not an expert on carbon-neutrality as a whole, but I can certainly comment on the transport dimensions of it. Here are some reasons to bet on Seattle, in particular, as a place that might get closer to carbon-neutrality in transportation than most other North American cities. Ultimately, all of these are about geography. Continue Reading →

Good News on American Census Data

Posted on January 2, 2010 in General

The New Republic’s blog The Avenue notices some good news for US transportation planners and advocates:

Last week, President Obama signed the 2010 Consolidated Appropriations Act, an amalgam of six separate appropriations bills providing $447 billion to an array of federal departments. A small fraction of this funding is devoted to supporting federal statistical agencies that generate the demographic, economic, and social data that will help metros better understand themselves. …

Continue Reading →

If You Like Intellectual Travel-Writing on Cities …

Posted on December 31, 2009 in Meta

If you like intellectual travel-writing on cities, you might enjoy some of the work that I do on the personal blog, Creature of the Shade. Most posts there are on either cities or nature, and sometimes both. My pieces on cities tend to dwell on architecture and urban form, and usually track unstructured long walks (what Baudelaire called flânerie) across the city in question. Posting there is much more intermittent than here, so if you like it you’ll probably want to put it on a reader.

In 2009 I did fairly satisfying pieces on Berlin and Paris, and a short mood-piece on the Netherlands (which can be understood as one city, the Randstad, and its rural hinterland). There are decent 2008 pieces on Delhi and Visakhapatnam in India. And while I find it impossible to write as a traveler about cities I live in, a small piece on Sydney happened while the place was still new to me. The 2006 Montréal post is not bad.

Happy New Year, everyone. Back to transit topics tomorrow.

Holiday Greetings from a Post-Petroleum Moment

Posted on December 20, 2009 in Rail Transit, Sydney, Tourism

Downshifting into the holiday, here’s a bit of pure transit tourism.

Transit is often a source of frustration in Sydney, but no city I’ve encountered offers better transit options for getting into the natural world. Sydney is ringed on all sides by spectacular national parks. Most are served by the electrified outer-suburban train lines, which run usually every 30-60 minutes and deliver you to small stations right at a trailhead. It’s remarkably easy to go for a long day of hiking, or even to launch a backpacking trip, without a car. One of the longest day hikes I’ve ever done was 26 km along the coast of the Royal National Park just south of the city. Using a train+ferry at one end of the hike and the train at the other, the whole trip was possible, and even pleasant, on transit. Continue Reading →

As Washington Shivers …

Posted on December 19, 2009 in Language, Public Outreach, Washington DC

Anyone interested the transit effects of weather will appreciate this press release from WMATA in Washington DC, announcing the suspension of all above-ground transit services in the current snowstorm.

Metrorail trains will stop serving above-ground stations at 1 p.m.
today, Saturday, December 19, due to heavy snowfall that is covering
the electrified third rail, which is situated eight inches above the
ground. The third rail must be clear of snow and ice because it is the
source of electricity that powers the trains. Metro officials believe
that by 1 p.m. the exposed third rail will be covered by snow. All
Metrobus and MetroAccess service also will stop at 1 p.m. because
roadways are quickly becoming impassable.

Continue Reading →

Can Transit Perform Well in “Abandoned” Urban Cores?

Posted on December 19, 2009 in General

This post, which points out that transit can’t be judged on the low ridership of services where ridership isn’t the goal, drew this question from Rob:

I have a question about cities with weak urban cores. I don’t know much about Seattle, but the story that the numbers tell is that the city’s population is currently near its historical high. But what do you do in cities that are losing population, like many in the rust belt? In my hometown, Cleveland, the population is lower than it’s been since 1900. Many urban neighborhoods are no longer the densest areas (there are 3 inner-ring suburbs more dense than the city-proper). What do you think?

As I explained, if Seattle’s King County Metro were pursuing a pure ridership objective, it would cut almost all service in the low-density suburbs and put all those buses in Seattle as higher frequencies on dense corridors. The principle is the same in any network:

If your goal is ridership, follow patterns of dense development with intense service.

Continue Reading →

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