Are the streets of your downtown all too similar to each other, all full of lots of cars and maybe a few trucks and buses? Do the differences between parallel streets, in commercial character and pedestrian life, seem feeble compared to the mass of identical traffic lanes that dominate the visual impression? Often, the most efficient downtown network designs, and the best urban design outcomes, result from making parallel streets more different from each other, more specialized around different functions. Streetcars (trams) used to drive such specialization, and sometimes still do, but elsewhere cities need to find their way back to that logic, with or without streetcars. One of the first big American successes in this direction was the Portland transit mall, which opened in 1977. There, two of the most central streets in downtown were given over primarily to transit, while parallel streets one block over were devoted mainly to cars. Continue Reading →
London: the Circle Reaches an End
One of the world’s most famous continuous loops is finally reaching an endpoint. The London Underground’s Circle Line, which has long attracted tourists with its simplicity but bedeviled its operators with lack of rest, is to be broken apart into a “tadpole” shape, with trains leaving the circle at Paddington, via a spur of the current Hammersmith & City Line, to end at Hammersmith. Continue Reading →
Bus-Rail Debates in a Beautiful Abstract City, and in Los Angeles
On a recent post, commenter Pantheon laid out the core idea that explains why I cannot be a full-time rail booster, even though I love riding trains as much as anyone:
The problem can be posed in the abstract in the following way. Let’s
say we have a city with 20 neighbourhoods, A-T. Our city has a big
deficit in transit infrastructure, and limited resources for redressing
it. We have X dollars to build infrastructure, which is enough to do
one of the following things:
Continue Reading →
Bus Rapid Transit Followup
I’ll pull together a response to feedback on the controversial Brisbane busway post in the next few days, but meanwhile, Engineer Scotty asks a good clarifying question:
Part of the problem with BRT [Bus Rapid Transit] acceptance in the US, is [that] most visible BRT systems … tend to look and act like rail-based metros. In the US, we speak of BRT lines–the Silver Line in Boston, the Orange Line in LA, EmX in Eugene, OR–and so forth. The busses which run on BRT are different than the local busses (different branding, different route nomenclature, different fare structures, rapid boarding, longer station spacing, nicer stations, proof-of-payment or turnstiles rather than pay-the-driver-as-you-board)–
Continue Reading →
Los Angeles: Reader Feedback on the Gold Line
My attempt at a feel-good post on the opening of the East Los Angeles Gold Line light rail extension attracted a lot of comment from locals who don’t feel so good about it. Continue Reading →
Brisbane: Bus Rapid Transit Soars
If you’ve never been to Brisbane, Australia, you’ve probably never seen Bus Rapid Transit done at the highest standard of quality in a developed country. Only Ottawa comes close.
In the US, in particular, a generation of activists has been taught that Bus Rapid Transit means inferior rapid transit, because there’s no will to insist on design choices that protect buses from delay as completely as trains are usually protected. Continue Reading →
Los Angeles: Gold Line Opens; “Planners” Blamed
Congratulations to Los Angeles on today’s opening of the Gold Line light rail extension, which runs from Union Station through several historically neglected suburbs to East Los Angeles, and will probably someday go further.
More precisely, congratulations to every Angeleno except Ari B.Bloomekatz of the Los Angeles Times, who wrote this:
Why is the Gold Line not a subway?
From the beginning, residents and politicians on the Eastside pushed for the Gold Line extension to be built completely underground. In the end, transportation planners decided to make a roughly 1.7-mile portion of the Gold Line a subway — the part that runs underneath Boyle Heights. The majority of the route runs above ground.
Urban vs Local?
In his NYT profile of Republican Senator John Thune, David Brooks offered urbanists an especially velvet-gloved insult:
His populism is not angry. … But it’s there, a celebration of the small and local over the big and urban.
This rhetorical device is meant to imply, without quite saying, that “local” is the opposite of “urban,” just as “small” is the opposite of “big.”
Most readers of this blog probably value local government, local achievement, and maybe even locally-grown food. Many of us want cities that feel more like aggregations of localities, places where local experiences — like shops where the clerk remembers your name — are an important counterpoint to the inevitable impersonality of large-scale mechanisms like, say, efficient rapid transit.
But the Republicans have lost the cities. (As New York Governor George Pataki supposedly said to George Bush as they approached the crowds gathered to hear Bush speak at the ruins of the World Trade Center: “See all those people? None of them voted for you!”) So they may well feel that they can use “urban” in a negative sense without much cost.
Keep an eye out for rhetorical uses of “urban” as the opposite of “local.” I bet we’ll hear this trope again.
via www.nytimes.com
On Scramble Crossings
Peter Parker at Melbourne on Transit has an interesting analysis of “scramble crossings” at signals. Scramble crossings are phases of a signal that give pedestrians the green in all directions, so that they can cross in any direction including diagonally across the intersection. Sydney, where I live, has exactly one of them, to my knowledge. It’s right in front of Town Hall. Continue Reading →
Integrating Transit and Land Use: A Cautionary Tale
The Transport Politic tells the story of a new rapid transit corridor study in suburban Maryland, extending west from DC Metro’s Red Line terminus at Shady Grove. Don’t worry if you don’t know the geography. Think of this, instead, as a Rohrshach test. There’s a yellow option and a blue option, and the squiggly blue option has an additional optional squiggle in green. Which one would you rather ride?