For Walkability and Good Transit, and Against Boondoggles and Pollution
A presentation by the Bavarian Ministry of Housing, Construction, and Transport (StMB) about expansion plans for the Nuremberg S-Bahn includes several branches to be electrified. Naturally, the presentation includes costs and distances. However, dividing the cost by the distance has little hope of giving us the normal electrification costs in Germany, because all of these [ ]
Bus grids in North American cities are easy for planners and riders to understand, and help avoid excessive detours. Nearly all American and Canadian cities have gridded streets, often stretching over the entire city and even its suburbs, which makes it easy to run buses this way. Because some large cities, like Chicago and Toronto, [ ]
The Federal Railroad Administration just released phase 1 of its own study on Penn Station capacity. Assuming that the Gateway tunnel is built but no other improvements to the station are made, the FRA thinks that the station s infrastructure can handle a peak traffic of 32 trains per hour entering from New Jersey in the [ ]
Corridor zoning is a style of development, in which major arterial streets are zoned for high residential and commercial density, while side streets remain zoned for low density, sometimes even for single-family housing. Yesterday, a discussion on social media brought up transit-oriented development, so I d like to explain why corridor zoning is not TOD, in [ ]
New England rail activist Kenny Uong talked about some New England rail lines that should be built. The proposals are not bad in theory, and remind me of longstanding advocate demands, but in practice, the prioritization is all wrong. In truth, further investment in regional rail in New England by which I mean RegionalBahn-style [ ]
The Federal Transit Administration (FTA) has a model for ridership estimation for public transit lines, called STOPS. It s designed to be simplified enough that transit agencies can compute rough projections with it without having a large permanent in-house team dedicated to it (the MTA has a team of about 12). At the Transit Costs Project, [ ]
Two weeks ago, the Institute for Progress published a playbook called Transit Abundance, comprising 15 policy briefs about reducing construction costs. One of them was my own, about itemization of costs. Eric has a good one about phasing funding to prevent the situation of the Boston Green Line Extension in which the planning for the [ ]
Intercity trains usually only call at the main cities, and only at their main stations. However, in some cases, they make more than one stop in the same city. Examples include the Northeast Corridor with its two Boston stops, the Shinkansen stopping at Shinagawa and Ueno each a few kilometers out of Tokyo Station, Israel [ ]
Trains and big cities are more efficient on a typical cost basis than cars. The operating costs of trains are such that even the unsubsidized costs of big-city metros and bus networks are a fraction of those of cars. For example, New York City Transit, despite its high operating costs, manages to serve a linked [ ]
American and British discourses on public transportation are too obsessed with getting regular funding. In the United States, it s a commonplace among advocates that what the mode really needs is a regular source of funding protected from the usual political process. American thinktanks trying to talk about construction costs, such as Eno, even spoke with [ ]