Tag: transportation

The Diverging Diamond

Strong Towns takes on The Diverging Diamond and suburban traffic engineers everywhere.  It’s nice to see someone on the conservative end of the spectrum also arguing passionately for livable density and good urban spaces.  He comes to it from an economic point of view — we don’t have anywhere near the pile of cash required to maintain the infrastructure we’ve built (and we never will, because it’s expensive and does not come close to paying for itself in terms of economic benefits)  so we need to let it crumble or actively remove it, and go back to a network of roads connecting places, which are filled with streets — networks that facilitate local activity, especially economic activity, and which are cheaper to maintain as well.  And better for pedestrians, and kids, and biking, and sidewalk cafes too.

He’s got a good TEDx talk too, up here:

Bikes and Bus Rapid Transit

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There’s still political wrangling to be done and funding to be found, but with a little luck we’ll see something resembling Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) coming to the US 36 corridor Real Soon Now.  I think this is great, and will make very efficient use of the infrastructure, and limited tax dollars that we’ve got to spend from the FasTracks fund, but it does pose an issue for those of us who like to combine the regional express buses with bicycle-based last-mile connections.  In the current RTD system, the regional buses have a huge amount of bicycle carrying capacity.  There are two racks on the front, as with nearly all RTD buses, but the cargo bays underneath can easily accommodate another dozen bikes.  Lots of the features that make BRT significantly better than normal buses also make them difficult to integrate with our current practice of taking our bikes along with us on the bus.  See the Transmilenio system in Bogotá as an example:

Continue reading Bikes and Bus Rapid Transit

Rethinking the Economics of Traffic Congestion

The Atlantic Cities takes a look at the Economics of Traffic Congestion.  It turns out that congestion is positively correlated with per-capita GDP, and there’s little evidence to suggest that traffic congestion ends up inhibiting economic development significantly.  In their words it’s nothing more than a metric of how convenient it is to drive an automobile.  But many cities still insist on “Level of Service” as a metric of success in their transportation master planning process, under the assumption that congestion must necessarily be bad for the economy.

The Growing Popularity of Bus Rapid Transit

The Atlantic Cities has a piece on the growing popularity of bus rapid transit (BRT), both in the developing world and more recently cash-strapped transit authorities in the US.  When it’s done right, it’s been called a “surface subway” or “rail on rubber”.  Done half-assed, it’s just another bus line.  Let’s hope we get it right with FasTracks on US 36.

When shared cars kill

Peer to peer carshare cars are killing people, because cars of any kind kill people… not because they’re shared.  They’re big and heavy and fast, and they get operated in densely populated areas.  Anybody who thought this wouldn’t come up when they started setting up these services was delusional.  The thing I don’t really get is why on earth is the owner of the car liable for an accident involving it?  Assuming the car didn’t spontaneously explode due to poor maintenance, I presume the death and destruction is a consequence of bad driving, texting, drinking, poor road engineering, etc.  Just like all the other 40,000 people who get killed by cars in the US every year.  The problem that needs to be fixed here isn’t intrinsic to car sharing, it’s a problem with the way we assign liability in automobile accidents.

Carsharing saves city governments millions

Migrating city fleets to car-sharing has been able to reduce the size of those fleets by 50-75%, and increase vehicle utilization from 30 to 70%, which means way less in the way of city capital costs dedicated to cars.  It also means a lot of policymakers getting much more familiar with the sharing economy.

How Google’s Driving Costs Misses the Train

A fun critique of the estimated driving costs that you get from Google Maps, from Alex Steffen.  The costs of driving are largely (mostly?) systemic, and external to the individual, and predicated on an assumption of car ownership, and a mile-for-mile interchangeability between driving trips and walking/biking/transit trips, which is empirically wrong.  People who don’t rely on cars for transportation do the same things in far fewer miles (3 to 9 times fewer, depending on the urban fabric they are embedded within).

Fourmile Creek Failure

Yesterday the Boulder Greenways Advisory Committee killed the Fourmile Creek Path because of objections from the NIMBYs living near the right-of-way.  Separated off-street infrastructure that’s available year round is vital to getting kids on bikes, and seeing them as a real mode of transportation.  Political will is essential to build for the future even when the nearby and present interests are opposed.  Without some backbone here, we’re never going to get a transportation system that isn’t wholly dependent on fossil fuels, or streets that are built for human beings.

Taking Parking Lots Seriously, as Public Spaces

An article from the New York Times about the architecture of parking lots, and how they might be much better used as public spaces with some design tweaks. Some cities like Houston and LA, dedicate a full third of their land area to parking lots, creating hard paved urban deserts and storm runoff disasters. They say that simply suggesting that we “buy fewer cars” is glib (I disagree) but clearly point out the folly of requiring vast quantities of parking by law, and then giving it away for free, thus hiding the true costs.