Round Up: Transit Property Names

Transit property names make for a lean alphabet soup.  Especially among older agencies, acronyms condense the lengthy and the specific (Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District) into the pat and the convenient (SEPTA, NICTD), monikers small enough to fit on tokens and double as logos.  But there are only so many words available for describing...

Hybrids: Leaves on the Nevergreen Tree

Yahoo’s green blog had a post a few days ago that listed writer Lori Bongiorno’s green hypocrites.  One of them was certain hybrid owners: “Owns a hybrid, but drives all around town alone. The kind of car you drive is just one part of the transportation equation. Walking, biking, carpooling, and taking public transportation when you can are also important. Try to drive the most fuel-efficient...

The High Cost of “Major Service Change”

The headline on Phillip Matier’s and Andrew Ross’s story just sounded bad:  “BART spending $800K to define three words.”  It is easy to imagine the public saying “That’s more than 250,000 per word,” or “I’d have done it for half that.”  In fact, commenters on the online version of the San Francisco Chronicle story had lots of other three-word proposals like “Clean the Trains,”...

Streetcar Maiden, USA

Portland's first streetcars made in USA. Courtesy United Streetcar Skoda is a legendary firm dating from 1859 that has made weapons, brewing equipment, bridge parts, airplanes, and automobiles (now a separate division owned by Volkswagen).  Today the Czech company makes steam turbines and condensers, but the few Americans who are aware of Skoda probably know the company because of its transit...

Population Pyramids II: How to Build

The raw data from the census in Excel. Following up on Population Pyramids I which shows the story-telling power of population pyramids, this post explains how to create them. Negotiating the labrynth of the U.S. Census Beureau can be a challenge so this link will take you right to the 2008 ACS 1-year Data.  Under the 2008 tab in the blue area chose Subject Tables from the list at right.  Select...

Losing Our FedEx Moment: Farewell to Charters

Gainesville (FL) RTS will not be running its Gator Aider that takes Florida fans from malls and new urban developments to Ben Hill Griffin Stadium on home football game days this fall (2010).  A private charter operator Fabulous Coach Lines answered RTS’s charter notice and is going to operate a new service renamed the Navigator (one hopes it will be printed as NaviGator).  It will cost $10 (over...

Keeping Riders

Saleswoman Deanna Droira-Garcia very suddenly lost her ability to drive when she began having epileptic seizures.  As a result she was riding Tri-rail down in Miami, Florida, and saw a car card advertising a competition for the best stories on why riders use and value transit.  Before her seizures, Droira-Garcia had driven not only to work, but for work as she traveled to make sales calls.  She...

Anatomy of a Good Stop

Bus stops are the sentinels, the grunts, the pawns, the privates, the foot soldiers of every transit agency.  Unlike bus depots and rail stations, glory hounds all with their cover, vending, restroom facilities, security and more, the bus stop stands alone, ignored until activated by the presence of a human.  Then it is a flag in the breeze calling for service until the vehicle departs and the bus...

Population Pyramids I: Snapshots of a Place

If your community were a junior prom, a population pyramid would be its photograph.  Girls on the left, boys on the right, all clustered by clique, or in this case, by age group.  These handy planning tools graphically illustrate the age and sex composition of a place (city, state, nation, whatever) in a simple, immediately accessible way and should be included in any analysis of said place whether...

The Met in Metro

  Shelters on the Sprinter Line in Charlotte are unique identifiers but also part of the urban fabric. Photo courtesy of CATS. Art has historically been public, civic – both a product of and contributor to collective identity.  From Egyptian glyphs to idealized Greek athletes, from Roman triumphal arches to intricate altar pieces, art condescends to tell us something about who we are, where...

Go Figure: Figure-ground as a Land Use/Transportation Tool

It has long been widely recognized by many city planners, urban designers, architects, landscape architects, and historic preservationists, that, among many other influences, a viable community has a balanced relationship between building mass and open space that gives it a sense of compactness, spatial definition, and is in human scale. A typical figure-ground. This concern is even more relevant...

To Get to the Other Side

“Why did the chicken cross the road?” is the start of what is probably the first or second joke we ever hear in our lifetimes (my favorite response is one I saw on t-shirts in Texas:  “To prove to the armadillo it could be done!”).  That old saw came to mind when I was talking to my friend and professor of transportation planning at Florida State University Gregory Thompson (he also wrote...

Tutorial: FTIS

If you ever have a need to find ridership or any other transit data from transit properties (including your own) then you need to know about FTIS.  It stands for the Florida Transit Information System.  The Florida in the name refers to the state where the system was developed and the DOT that made it, not to the data or who may use it.  It is an easy-to-use interface of the National Transportation...

Transit is in the business of moving people, not relieving congestion

As regularly as an equatorial sunrise, Google Alerts sends me news clips from around the world of transit.  From these articles I know light rail is making progress in the Carolinas, transit ridership is increasing in car-mad Phoenix, and congressional candidates are talking about transit on the campaign trail.  Unfortunately, most of these missives from the transit field carry with them the promise...

Transit Shelter Advertising: Shelter Brought to You By . . .

Shelter image Michal Zacharzewski   Off-site advertising bans make ad-sponsored shelters tricky.  Why the California 9th Circuit Court of Appeals might be the new BFF of JTA.  The video is excellent.  Mike Miller, Jacksonville Transit Authority Director of External Affairs, has been showing it to citizen groups, neighborhood associations, civic organizations, elected officials and others. ...