Fairer and Smarter Fares
In public transport circles there is always going to be a lot of debate over the levels of fares. Should they be higher to reduce the amount of subsidy required? Should they be lower to encourage greater ridership and/or for social equity reasons?…
30 Comments Guest Post: Los Angeles – but not as we know it
This is a Guest Post by Peter and continues his series on overseas cities.
Los Angeles is a poster child for automobile dependent sprawl – a moniker that is somewhat justified, even if it also happens to be one of the denser American cities (if you use the rather dodgy measurement of average density).…
The complexity of density
You would think that calculating, and analysing, the density of a city would be a fairly perfunctory mathematical task, and would tell us useful information about the nature of that city. As I noted in this previous blog post, perhaps the most challenging aspect of calculating a city’s ‘average density’ is working out where its boundaries are.…
Marketing PT better
Generally I feel that Auckland Transport (and ARTA before them) does a pretty poor job of marketing public transport in Auckland. They’re obviously not helped by key factors such as the vast variety of different bus companies, or the general lack of funding and neglect for the PT system up until recently, but there are clearly ways in which we could do things better.…
Learning from LA – PT marketing
Similar to yesterday’s post on New York, this is a great little video on the steps that Los Angeles’s transport agency has taken to improve the marketing of public transport – and to make public transport “cool”. A couple of things really stood out for me: the cleverness of using different coloured buses to indicate different service types – such as express services versus local services and some of the fantastic artwork that fills their train stations.…
A solution to the “density dilemma”?
Following on from posts made last week on both the Humantransit blog and on my blog about the complex relationship between urban density and public transport use – and how sometimes we end up with some rather bizarre relationships between the two – Jarrett at Humantransit has done a post that I really think finally cracks the issue of linking density and public transport use.…
Density and Public Transport
It’s always fun having debates about city densities and public transport. A post by Jarrett Walker at Humantransit.org makes an excellent contribution to the debate – as we seek to answer the age old question of “does density matter when it comes to the viability of public transport?”…
Buses vs Trains in capturing riders
Jarrett at Humantransit.org has an interesting post about how public transport has developed in Los Angeles, and continues to develop, over the past decade or so. His post is based on a Los Angeles Times article which claims that it would have been smarter to invest money in making buses cheaper and getting more of them on the road, than it would have been to construct the rail improvements in LA over the past decade or two.…
LA and Auckland: Shared Histories
Both Los Angeles and Auckland are remarkably alike in many ways, but not in the only ways that you might think (sprawled, auto-dependent cities). In actual fact, both cities are relatively dense (new world) cities and both developed around rail (in particular tramways).…
Human Transit on Los Angeles
The Human Transit blog has an excellent recent post on Los Angeles, and how it could well become the next great “transit metropolis”. There are some pretty big plans floating around Los Angeles at the moment to expand their rail system.…
Processing...