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 →
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.
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
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 →
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?
Most North American transit agencies are cutting service this year, but there’s a huge difference in how they’re doing it. My last post discussed the painful cuts happening at Tri-Met in Portland. Here’s better news out of San Francisco, where service is being trimmed and shaped not just to save money, but to create a simpler, more frequent, and arguably fairer network. The changes are informed by a long study and outreach effort called the Transit Effectiveness Project, which is finally bearing some fruit in this year’s harsh desert of funding. Continue Reading →
As hard budget shortfalls sweep across North America, transit agencies are making all kinds of changes to balance the budget. Portland’s Tri-Met tried at first to cut low-ridership services, but as the red ink keeps flowing they’ve finally had to cut something every urbanist should care about. They’re cutting the core Frequent Network, the service that’s designed to meet the needs of people who want to get around the city easily all day, with spontaneity and a sense of personal freedom. Continue Reading →
The Bay Bridge connecting San Francisco with Oakland (and most of the continent) has been closed for several days. SF Chronicle :
The bridge was shut down Tuesday evening. High winds and heavy
traffic loosened a pair of tie-rods and a steel bracket that was
installed Labor Day weekend to take pressure off a fracture discovered
in a structural beam – an eyebar – on the eastern span.
The 5,000-pound assembly crashed onto the upper deck, totaling three cars during the evening commute. Continue Reading →
The last post on spatial vs narrative navigation got quite an interesting comment thread, and interesting response posts by both Angus and Cap’n Transit, all of which I encourage you to read. Commenter Russ also offered several useful scholarly links, especially to Janet Vertesi’s very readable article exploring how the familiar London Tube map structures people’s images of the city. Continue Reading →
Can science explain why some transit system maps are so much better than others? Alex Hutchinson has an excellent article in the Canadian newsmagazine The Walrus on how increased reliance on Global Positioning Systems (GPS) for navigation may be reshaping our brains. Might this be related to the difficulty of getting good maps of a transit system?
Humans have two methods of navigation. Spatial navigators can construct maps in their heads as they experience a place, and also tend to be good at using maps as navigational aids. Narrative navigators navigate by creating or following verbal directions. For spatial navigators, the answer to the question where? is a position in mapped space. For narrative navigators, the answer to where? is a story about how to get there. Obviously, this is a spectrum; many of us are in the middle with partial capabilities in both directions. (I think we probably all know this from our own experience, but according to Hutchinson, the definitive academic study showing this difference has the amazingly recent date of 2003.)
Taxi drivers, obviously, have to be spatial navigators, because they must constantly plot courses for trips they’ve never made before. Before the advent of GPS, this requirement actually shaped their brains. Hutchinson writes: