The Pedestrian Accelerator

I came to transit on foot, I like to say.  Of course one always accesses transit on foot, that is as a pedestrian, but I also mean I got into the transit business because I enjoy walking so much, especially in places that make walking a pleasure.  I used transit occasionally growing up in Tampa where transit service was occasional and walking was torture; much more often as an embassy guard in Seoul,...

Where Trolleys Fly: The French Tram Experience

Tom Parkinson is the coathor of this photo essay which is an excerpt of a presentation given to the TRB Rail Transit Committee in January 2013.  Click images to enlarge.   Look mom, no wires. The French word for placing trams in context sensitive locations, as in this historic street in Orleans, is insertion. The French decided to get rid of traditional trams in the 1930s.  The last traditional...

Lean on Me

  In case you have not read NPR’s and the New York Times’ exhaustive coverage, sitting is now considered bad for your health.  From these breathless news accounts (We are all sitting, we are all fat, we are going to die!) we are also learning that early office workers were more likely to lean against cabinets to read and write and that only slackers sat.   Now companies are...

VMT, Capacity, and Congestion: a visual study

Vehicle miles travelled (VMT), capacity, and congestion are related if not always well understood concepts that are essential to the public discourse on transportation funding.  I am going to try to clear them up with this visual explanation.  Imagine the differences between these three things:  a children’s bucket with 100 marbles, a tumbler with 2 ounces of whiskey, and a half full glass.  VMT...

Paying the User Fee

The knock on transit is often that buses and trains are heavily subsidized by governments, which they are because pretty much all transportation projects are heavily subsidized, roadways getting the biggest bite of the subsidy cheese.  That discussion usually happens on the supply side, however, where the rubber stamp meets the road and millions of dollars go to states, local governments, regional...

Tampa Streetcar: The fare to go nowhere?

The Tampa TECO streetcar is in trouble.  A recent story in the Tampa Tribune describes a touristy, toy streetcar in a ridership death spiral.  HART, which operates the TECO Trolley, expects ridership to drop by 80,000 passengers for a fiscal 2013 total of just 330,000.  If those numbers bear out, that is a 50% drop from 2010.  From Ted Jackovics’ story we learn: Possible reasons ridership is...

The local

Local is hip.  Local is cool.  Local is sustainable.  Transit is local.  Many transit operators put icons or other information on transit maps to help passengers locate Walmarts and regional shopping centers whose profits go to Bentonville, Arkansas, and New York City among others.  But what about local places?  Even if the transit operator is Veolia, MV Transportation, or First Transit, the...

Caught in the shame phase

Nothing looks more out of place at the intersection of two suburban roads than a pair of storm troopers.  The second most out-of-place looking thing at the intersection of two suburban roads is anyone else. We can talk about low service frequencies, long walking distances from bus stops to buildings, and exposure to the elements as the worst part of serving suburban areas with transit, but in my experience...

Developers: Make it your own

Real estate developers are often understandably frustrated when dealing with government red tape: concurrency, zoning, impact fees, and the rest.  In Tallahassee the builders of new development, especially when it is dense student housing, are usually called upon to incorporate some transit facilities for their future residents to use and typically these requests don’t go down well.  This...

When Peaks are Plateaus

Peak hour, whether by motorcars as recorded by traffic counters or as additional vehicles put into service by transit agencies, takes its name from the way these data points appear on a graph.  In the morning and late afternoon more people use roads and usually more transit is provided so those periods have predictable spikes.   Not every transit agency has those peaks in service, including the...

A Weak Platform: The streetcar as development tool, not transportation

A person born in Tampa, Florida, or nearly any other significant American city in 1888, the year Frank J. Sprague produced the first successful electric streetcar in Richmond, Virginia, would live his youth knowing only the streetcar as a regular means of mechanized transport.   He would marry in a church within earshot of the clang of a streetcar bell and take his own young children on trips downtown...

Focus People!

I was friendly with an editor at the local newspaper and he mentioned to me that he was going to try out a new limited service route our transit agency was about to launch.  The day after the new service was initiated I called him to ask how his trip had gone.  “Perfect,” he said.  “It really went off without a hitch.”  I was, of course very glad to hear that.  I was then very surprised...

What’s in a B&A?

The place where a passenger alights (gets off) a bus has long been a semantic haze. Is it the bus stop? A landing pad? Is a shelter pad the same thing? Well, in case you have not come across this addition to the 2006 Americans with Disabilities Act Accessibility Guidelines (ADAAG) yet, we now have a common name for it: the boarding and alighting area, or B&A. The stop itself is where a bus (or...

They Say: The Spare Ratio is 20%

Small enough? Photo from Motiondesign The question comes up all the time in the transit business:  why doesn’t your transit agency does not deploy smaller buses?  This question has been posed to me so many times now that my answer is reflexive and automatic.  For those not intimately plugged into the transit business there are four reasons: Capacity.  There is no savings.  There is no money...

A Model of Efficiency

In the previous post I discussed the inherent difficulties of a radial system based on observations of many systems but also from my own work at the agency in Tallahassee where we took apart a radial system and created a decentralized, grid-like pattern.  Or at least as close to a grid as possible in the highly radial-oriented street network of Tallahassee.  After six months of operation, a difficult...