Long ago I highlighted an early product by WalkScore.com which enabled you to select a location and time of day, and then showed you a map of all the places you can get to on transit within a specified time. Reader Tom West points me to a new effort along similar lines, called Mapnificent, by Stefan Wehrmeyer. He describes the product on his blog in both geeky and practical detail. Continue Reading →
Archive | November, 2010
The Peril of Low Base Fares
Are transit fares in Los Angeles cheaper than in San Francisco? That’s the impression you’ll get from a direct comparison of the base adult cash fare. The travel blog Price of Travel just compared the base fares of 80 major tourist cities around the world and noted that, while San Francisco Muni’s base fare is $2.00, that of the Los Angeles County MTA is $1.50. Continue Reading →
The Horrors of “Transferring” in 1974, and a Happier Future
Posted on November 16, 2010 in Connections, Transfers, Fares, Journalism, Legibility, Oakland, Vancouver
Connections, or transfers as North Americans depressingly call them, are the foundation of a simple, frequent transit network that’s there whenever you need it. I laid out the basic argument here, but in brief, a transit system that tries to run direct service from everywhere else (so that nobody has to make a connection) ends up as a confusing tangle of hundreds of overlapping lines, few of which are frequent enough to rely on or simple enough to remember. Continue Reading →
Transit’s Role in “Sprawl Repair”
Posted on November 15, 2010 in Access, Be on the Way, Bus Rapid Transit, Fresno, Los Angeles, Pedestrians, Transit-Oriented Development (TOD), Urban Structure
Duany Plater-Zyberk, one of the leading planning firms associated with New Urbanism, is thinking about “sprawl repair,” a process by which utterly car-dependent landscapes could be transformed into something more walkable, and thus more resilient. Galina Tachieva of DPZ has an article explaining the concept at Planetizen. Continue Reading →
Portland: Now, the 1970s Need Historic Preservation
You know you’re middle aged when a thing that was new to you as a teenager shows up in a museum, or as an artifact deserving “historic preservation.” I will never forget coming around a corner in Berlin’s DDR museum and seeing a whole bunch of wide-eyed teenagers gazing at one display; it turned out that they were all looking at a manual typewriter. Continue Reading →
New York’s Broadway: Why Do the Cab Drivers Hate It?
New York City Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan is here in Sydney, and spoke last night at the City of Sydney’s CityTalks series, hosted as always by Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore. Sadik-Khan gave her standard presentation on her work in New York, with emphasis on the conversion of traffic and parking space to pedestrian and park spaces. She also highlighted the new Bus Rapid Transit project, called Select Bus Service, clearly distinguishing between SBS projects that are still compromised, such as First/Second Avenue and Fordham Road, and those that really will be fully exclusive-lane and thus highly reliable, such as the 34th Street line now under development. Continue Reading →
Canberra: A New Circulator Network for the National Core
Posted on November 9, 2010 in Branding, Canberra, Downtowns, Frequent Networks, Legibility, Maps, Marketing, Shuttles (Circulators)
Washington DC has its downtown circulator, and now the Washington DC of Australia, Canberra, has one too. What’s more, my clients in Canberra created their circulator for almost zero in new operating costs, using one of my favorite planning tricks. Starting next week, four color-coded lines will provide frequent links among all the major tourist attractions, government buildings, universities, commercial districts, and interchange points in the dense core areas of the Australian capital. Continue Reading →
Guangzhou Abandons Free-Fare Experiment
Guangzhou, the southern Chinese megacity that is to host the 2010 Asian Games this month, has abandoned a plan to offer free public transit while the Games are on.
The plan was to ban half of all of the city’s private cars from the road each day (using an “even-odd rule,” a scheme by which certain license plates can be used only on certain days), and also to ban traffic unrelated to the Games from certain roads. In return, public transit would be free during the Games. Continue Reading →
Canberra: Public Radio Interview on Transit in Australia’s Capital
Last month I did a radio interview for Alex Sloan of ABC 666 Canberra (the main public radio station in Australia’s national capital) on the broad future of public transit in that city, along with Monash University Professor Graham Currie. Much of what was said, especially about light rail and bus rapid transit, is true of any low-density New World city with populations under 1 million. ABC has now posted an MP3 of the interview here. Continue Reading →
Basics: The Spacing of Stops and Stations
The unglamorous but essential struggle over the spacing of consecutive stops or stations on a transit line is an area where there’s a huge difference in practice between North American and Australian agencies, for reasons that have never been explained to me as anything other than a difference in bureaucratic habit. In Australia, and in most parts of Europe that I’ve observed, local-stop services generally stop every 400m (1/4 mile, 1320 feet). Some North American agencies stop as frequently as every 100m (about 330 ft). Continue Reading →