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Category Archives: Good Transit
Quick Note: Vancouver’s Transit Revival
I’ve been looking for Canadian mode share numbers that are more recent than 2006; although there was a census in 2011, it apparently did not include such numbers. However, a separate survey regarding commuting was published a year ago, using … Continue reading
Posted in Good Transit, Transportation, Vancouver
14 Comments
Low- and Medium-Hanging Fruit
The entire process I try to apply to cost-effective rail construction is to figure out the best places to spend money per unit of time saved. Obviously, this is mainly for intercity traffic – for local traffic it’s more interesting … Continue reading
Regional Rail for New York: What Can Be Done Now
MTA Chairman Joe Lhota recently proposed to through-route commuter rail lines in the New York area, as was proposed in the past by the RPA, the Institute for Rational Urban Mobility, and more recently myself. Lhota proposed other, less flashy … Continue reading
Posted in Good Transit, New York, Regional Rail, Transportation
59 Comments
Transportation-Development Symbiosis
The RPA’s Regional Assembly has included the following idea submission: expand reverse-commuter rail service. The proposal calls for surveying city residents to look for the main available reverse-commuter markets, and for expanding reverse-peak service on the model of Metro-North. It … Continue reading
Posted in Development, Good Transit, New York, Providence, Regional Rail, Transportation, Urban Design, Urbanism
36 Comments
Quick Note: Good News Week
Via Systemic Failure, I learn that the FRA is finally reforming its train safety regulations on its own. This is an amazing development, partial as it is. This appears to derive from the FRA’s previous research into crash energy management, … Continue reading
Posted in FRA, Good Transit, Transportation
113 Comments
Commuter Rail Stop Distribution
One of the features of American commuter rail is that it’s intended to be used by suburbanites. The propensity for making nearly every station a park-and-ride, with poor pedestrian access, is one effect of this. Another effect is stop distribution. … Continue reading
Posted in Good Transit, Incompetence, Regional Rail, Transportation
79 Comments
Park and Rides, and Good Planning
Some people with experience in American bus planning have come strongly for park-and-rides, as a convenient means of concentrating all people boarding buses at one spot in order to improve frequency. The charge is led by Joel Azumah of Transport … Continue reading
Posted in Good Transit, Incompetence, Regional Rail, Transportation, Urban Transit
66 Comments
Trip Chaining
Gendered Innovations’ charts of trip chaining and gender breakdown of public transit riders got me thinking about how different systems of transportation handle a mixture of short and long trips. Eric Jaffe at The Atlantic Cities reports this and suggests … Continue reading
Posted in Cars, Development, Good Transit, Transportation, Urban Design, Urban Transit, Urbanism
16 Comments
The Limits of Clockface Scheduling
This is morally the last post in my series on improving the MBTA: see here, here, and here for the three previous posts. However, it’s a more general principle concerning interlined regional rail services. Good practice for running transit service … Continue reading
Posted in Good Transit, Regional Rail, Transportation
17 Comments
Improving the MBTA: Regional vs. Intercity Service
The MBTA commuter rail lines are laid in such a way that there’s an inherent tension between providing local service and providing longer-distance intercity service. It’s less apparent on the Providence Line because the intercity component, i.e. Boston-Providence, follows immediately … Continue reading
Posted in Good Transit, Providence, Regional Rail, Transportation, Urban Transit
58 Comments
