Subtlely reinforcing defacto motorways
Nelson Street and Fanshawe Street are pretty horrific roads to try and cross as a pedestrian – largely due to the high speeds that drivers travel at along them. You’re effectively stuck at trying to find one of the (very rare) signalised pedestrian crossings, or taking your life into your own hands by sprinting across when it looks clear.…
19 Comments PT Basics – operating costs
Human Transit has an excellently detailed analysis of public transport operating costs, which comes from Jarrett Walker’s upcoming book that’s bound to end up being a bible for public transport planners around the world. Each year we spend close to $150 million subsidising public transport in Auckland, so it’s utterly essential for us to ensure we’re running the most efficient system possible and making best use of that money.…
Making best use of comparator city studies
Jarrett Walker’s Human Transit blog has a post up about the study which compares Auckland to 13 other somewhat similar cities that I posted about yesterday. The post also usefully links to a full copy of the report. Jarrett helped put together the study, which compares many elements of Auckland’s public transport system to systems in Wellington, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, Sydney, Melbourne, Edmonton, Ottawa, Calgary, Vancouver, Honolulu, Portland and Seattle, coming to the general conclusion that on a lot of measures Auckland falls dead last.…
A different approach to bus routes
A few days back the Human Transit blog superbly outlined the basics of designing bus routes – using Halifax in Nova Scotia as the example. There are some excellent “basics” outlined in that post: the need to identify choke points, the need to have good “anchors” at each end of your route, the benefits of bouncing routes off at right-angles once you reach the edge of a grid system and so forth.…
Careful how you measure congestion
The NZ Herald is running a story today based on a study of Auckland’s most congested areas. According to the study, the worst congestion in Auckland is for those trying to make the trip between the city centre and Takapuna:
Morning traffic queues back from the Northern Motorway’s Esmonde Rd interchange mean Takapuna commuters face a harder slog to work for the distance travelled than other Aucklanders.…
Dead running – and how to reduce it
The Human Transit blog has a good post about “dead running”, which effectively is the time buses spend not in service. Jarrett notes the two general circumstances that create dead running:
All transit vehicles must travel between their operating bases, where they are stored and maintained, and the beginning and endpoints of service.…
Better bus signs
A good post on Human Transit highlights the usefulness of improving bus signage – and in particular the importance of naming routes by the main road they pass along, rather than by their destiation. A good example of an effective bus sign (by that I mean the signage on the front of the bus) is the 38 Geary Boulevard service in San Francisco: As Jarrett says in his post, this signage is great because it lets you know the bus runs along Geary Boulevard, while also saying that somewhere near the end of the route is V.A.…
Congestion Pricing
Since I wrote a post about congestion pricing/charging a week or so ago, a post has emerged on the excellent Human Transit blog, and Streetfilms have also put together a video on the issue: As I noted in my previous post, I’m somewhat agnostic about congestion pricing.…
The delicate balance of stop spacing
A fundamental question to think about when designing either a bus route or a train line is “how far apart should the stops be?” A very useful post on Human Transit explores this matter – and points out an interesting tension between the advantages of closer spacing and wider spacing: Wider stops boost speeds and therefore probably boost patronage as catching the bus or train becomes a more attractive option – thereby improving its economic efficiency.…
On-time PT stats: too blunt a measurement tool?
Humantransit has a thought-provoking blog post on whether measuring “on time performance” is really the best way to gauge the effectiveness of public transport in providing what its users want and need. Here’s a couple of interesting paragraphs:
I have a great deal of sympathy for transit executives trying to deal with on-time performance, because many of the causes of delay are outside a transit agency’s control.…
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