Reinventing Transport

Does your city have any public transport routes that guarantee high-frequency throughout the day? Are they metro/subway routes? Are some on buses? If any of those services are bus routes, are they highlighted as special, or do they seem like any other bus service? The Human Transit blog highlights the importance of being very clear which routes have high-quality, frequent service (regardless of technology): Berlin, for example, presents its system this way: Rapid transit, consisting of U-bahn and S-bahn. (These have numbers starting with U or S. Both are fully grade separated rail transit. ... ) Frequent local-stop transit, called the "Metro-Netz." Metro-Netz service is identified by a route number starting with M, and this supposedly guarantees service every 10 minutes or better for 20 hours a day. Metro-Netz service can be either streetcar or bus. Less-frequent local-stop transit, which is identified by a route number without an initial letter. Obvio...

[Update: Looking for more parking policy information?   Try Reinventing Parking. ] Ground floor living-room parking in Hanoi. I am busy starting up a very quick 13-city/country study of urban parking policy and outcomes around Asia. Maybe you can help? It is an exploratory study aiming to find out what parking issues are important in each place (so that follow-up research can dig deeper). The focus is mainly cars, but other vehicles are relevant too, especially motorcycles. I want to know about off-street parking AND off-street. I am keen to hear about residential parking AND work-based parking AND short-term parking at other places, like shops. A bit ambitious perhaps but I want it all. The study is also aimed at finding out if any of the major parking policy debates in Western cities are at all relevant anywhere in Asia. Can other places learn from how parking is done in any Asian cities? So, if you have a view on parking and how it works then please drop a comment...

Shared space street design is a fantastic innovation. But most excitement about shared space (or “naked streets”) seems to focus on the counter-intuitive phenomenon of “ safety through uncertainty ”. I think another important lesson from shared space has been neglected. A key benefit of shared space is that it expands the urban public realm. And this is done with little or no loss of transport utility. This point was emphasized by shared-space pioneer, Hans Monderman , but is often forgotten or under-emphasised. This "public space dividend" is also relevant to many more streets than shared space itself will ever be applied to. Many street-design innovations can yield such a dividend if they create spaces where speeds stay below about 30 km/h. This would allow a surprising amount of what we now think of as traffic space to become part of the low-speed public realm. How? I try to explain in an article, " Earning a Public Space Dividend in the Streets " ( pdf ), ju...

If you are interested in public transport excellence please check out the new Human Transit blog. It is written by long-time transit planner Jarrett Walker. He has shone in his first 2 weeks of blogging so far. Here are a few highlights: Unhelpful word watch: to transfer (he prefers 'to change') Transferring can be good for you, and your city (Don't believe it? See if Jarrett can persuade you.) Be on the way! (aimed at urban planners especially) Chicken, egg (can transport be discussed as a 'standalone' topic?)

Fun, art and gleeful spontaneity in the streets feature in this delightful and inspiring 20 min talk. The playfulness here is not just in the streets but with the streets . Ted Dewan at euroGel 2006 from Gel Conference on Vimeo . The potential highlighted here for life in streets is in total and utter contrast with the automobile dependent landscapes in my post below . Ted Dewan is the pioneer of ' road witching '. Towards the end of the video he makes some connections with David Engwicht 's 'mental speed bumps'. David also promotes safety through intrigue and uncertainty. Ted's talk also mentions the emerging possibilities of Shared Space . All of this is about reclaiming at least some of our street space as public realm again. It is about treating streets as places not highways. Do you think these ideas are relevant in the rest of the world, outside rich western cities? I think so. Hat tip to the wonderful How We Drive blog .

If you haven't visited North America or Australia or New Zealand maybe you are puzzled about "automobile dependence" and wonder what the fuss is about. Here are a few GoogleMaps images that might help. You can drag or zoom if you want to see the wider context or take a closer look. The Henry Farm or Yorkland Boulevard area north of Toronto. Yes, even Canada has sprawl. And yes, most of what you see in the top half of the image is open-lot parking. The eastern edge of downtown Atlanta. Giving cars easy accesss to the city centre requires this kind of thing. In the northern suburbs of Perth, Western Australia. It's the local shopping centre but do you think many would walk to it?

[Update: Looking for more parking policy information?   Try Reinventing Parking. ] So you think on-street parking is public property and should be free? Do you think local governments that charge for on-street parking are uncaring and money grabbing? Maybe you doubt that cheap on-street parking causes any problems? Then please take a look at Bern Grush's vivid description of the "cruising for parking" in one specific trip and all the problems it causes. The trip should have been 5km but searching for parking by driving in circles at the end made the journey 8.25km! And that is the least of the problems that Grush describes. The image above is from the post at the Grush Hour blog and shows just that last part of the journey. You couldn't ask for a better explanation of the need for performance-based pricing for on-street parking.

TransJakarta Corridor 1 station and bus Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) has a 'branding problem'! Bus improvements of many kinds are being called BRT. This is muddying debate over BRT in many places. Bogota clearly has superb BRT. More and more cities do. But is Delhi's 'first BRT corridor' really BRT? Are Taipei's median bus priority lanes BRT? How about Jakarta's busways? Walter Hook of ITDP has an interesting answer: It's not BRT if it's not on the map! Here is the relevant quote from an interview with Walter on Streetsblog NYC : A rule of thumb should be whether or not a map company would include the BRT system in a map of New York City. If it doesn't appear on any map other than as a standard bus route, then it has failed to enter the public consciousness as something above and beyond normal bus services. I knew TransJakarta had succeeded when I bought a 2007 tourist map and it included a map of TransJakarta and its stations. The Orange Line in LA...

[Update: Looking for more parking policy information?   Try Reinventing Parking. ] Problem 1: Is parking a hellish nightmare for your local business or shopping district? Do drivers complain that they can never find a parking space? Is the roadway clogged with honking vehicles searching for a parking spot? Problem 2: And are the local public facilities in terrible shape? Are the footways cracked? Drain covers broken? Rubbish uncollected? Are the street plantings (if any) dying? Does that sound familiar? Donald Shoup suggests a single solution to both of these problems : Performance-based pricing (would solve Problem 1) with the revenues returned to the local area to be spent on solving Problem 2. Shoup explains more in an article in the Feb 2009 edition of the Parking Today magazine: The Price of Parking on a Great Street As I have said before , I suspect this policy would be perfect for many of Asia's cities. Can anyone suggest a city in Asia that might be willing...

Who knew? Many Latin American city cores have wonderful pedestrian zones that rival those of European cities in quality. A new post by Barbara Knecht at Planetizen Interchange highlights the region's downtown pedestrian zones and its many Ciclovia (car-free Sunday's with certain roads closed to motor vehicles and opened to feet and non-motorised wheels). In a recent trip from Buenos Aires, Argentina to Santiago, Chile I traveled through Montevideo and Colonia, Uruguay; Rosario, Mendoza, San Juan and Cordoba, Argentina; Viña del Mar and Valparaiso, Chile. All ten cities had significant thriving downtown pedestrian zones. The smallest was perhaps 5 blocks in San Juan, the largest 30 blocks in Santiago. Actually, I did know. The photos with this post are mine, taken in Puebla, Mexico.

LOS? Was ist LOS? The traffic engineering concept of traffic Level of Service (LOS) is used to rate the acceptability of traffic flow on a road, using scores of A, B, C, D, E and F. Try typing " LOS level of service traffic " and almost ANY country name into your favourite search engine. You will quickly see that LOS is very widely used. OK but so what? The problem is, LOS is a disaster when clumsily applied to cities. It is one of the key ways that traffic planners stumble into the habit of making motor vehicle flows their highest priority. LOS is a key tool that blinds our decision-making processes to the possibility of having smarter goals such as those of the New Mobility Agenda , like accessibility , moving people and goods efficiently not vehicles, or making places great . The San Francisco StreetsBlog has a wonderful series of articles by Matthew Roth on LOS thinking and its alternatives: Paradise LOSt (Part I): How Long Will the City Keep Us Stuck in Our Cars? Para...

Four decades ago, French leaders wanted to remake Paris to suit the needs of the car. But in recent years, Paris has been reclaiming its streets for life's rich pageant, not just motor traffic. This Streetfilm (from the Livable Streets Network ) offers a wonderful visual tour of Paris's traffic-calming efforts. You will need a flash plug-in to see it. The whole archive of Streetfilms is well worth a good look.