I worked briefly on a civic tech project for rapid transit and started reading as much as I could about transit issues. I use these personal notes to help me remember articles that I have read. I also hope that they might be a helpful summary and introduction for others. However, these notes are not intended to be an exhaustive annotated bibliography nor a complete academic review of the current status of research. These are just my personal notes of material that I have already read or references to material that I hope to read soon.
Books and Articles
Sorted alphabetically by author’s last name, then in descending chronological order.
Darran Anderson. “The Getaway” in Grabar (2019), The Future of Transportation.
Not related to transit, but interesting nonetheless. He analyses the many surveillance technologies in cities today that make it difficult for anyone to “get away”.
Darran Anderson. 2017. Imaginary Cities A Tour of Dream Cities, Nightmare Cities, and Everywhere in Between.
Available at Multnomah County Libraries.
“Every architect, philosopher, artist, writer, planner, or citizen who dreams up an imaginary city offers lessons for our real ones; harnessing those flights of hopeful fancy can help us improve the streets where we live.”
[I have not read this yet.]
- “Identifying the Underlying Causes of Transit Ridership”. 30 minute webinar summarizing the project.
- Invented a dynamic dispatching algorithm that replaces schedules and helps minimize passenger waiting time on frequent transit routes.
- Twitter: @mslaurabliss
Laura Bliss. 2019. “Shortcuts” in Grabar (2019), The Future of Transportation.
Explains how individual smart phone apps that suggest alternate routes to avoid traffic congestion are business apps that do not provide a solution for urban congestion as a whole.
Laura Bliss. 2019-11-12. “Navigation Apps Changed the Politics of Traffic”.
Laura Bliss. 2019-08-09. “The Map That Made Los Angeles Make Sense”.
Discusses “the risk of maps that de-center the larger context in favor of the individual. … When a group of drivers veers off a jammed highway on an app’s recommendation, it can thicken congestion for surrounding commuters, even if a few drivers succeed in shaving a few minutes off their individual journeys.”
Laura Bliss. 2018-11-28. “A U.S. Transit Atlas That Ranks the Best (and Worst) Cities for Bus and Rail”.
This article is a summary and review of Christof Spieler’s book, “Trains, Buses, People: An Opinionated Atlas of US Transit”.
“Spieler’s atlas illustrates how high-performing public transportation boils down to a handful of key tenets: the density and walkability of an area, and the connectivity, frequency, and reliability of the service. Finding the proper capacity to meet demand matters, too, as do speed and legible tools for navigating the system, he writes.”
Laramie Bowron. 2019-09-12. “The Case for Revising Headways Policies”.
“There’s currently no standard in how most transit agencies measure the reliability of their headways, and it’s hurting the rider experience.”
Ricky Burdett, Philipp Rode (eds). 2018. Shaping Cities in an Urban Age.
Available at Multnomah County Libraries.
Public transport requirements leading to investment in high-capacity transport:
- Greater access to employment.
- Reduced commuting times.
- Reduced congestion.
- Better control of carbon emissions.
For example, Hong Kong: 79% of residents take public transport to work. Despite a 28% growth in population, commuting times have reduced by 50%. [p. 54]
Graham Carey. 2006. “Bus Rapid Transit — The Eugene-Springfield, OR, USA, Experience”. PDF.
Henry Grabar (ed). 2019. The Future of Transportation. SOM Thinkers.
Available at Multnomah County Libraries.
Chapters that I found most interesting:
- Darran Anderson. “The Getaway”.
- Laura Bliss. “Shortcuts”.
- Alison Griswold. “Fair Share”.
- Nick Van Mead. “Riding the Bus in Dar Es Salaam”.
- Twitter: @alisongriswold
- Oversharing blog. “More than you wanted to know about the sharing economy.”
- Quartz author
- Slate author
- Forbes author
Alison Griswold. 2019. “Fair Share” in Grabar (2019), The Future of Transportation.
Analysis of ride sharing, such as Uber and Lyft, as well as vehicle sharing programs for bicycles and scooters.
Steven Higashide. 2019. Better Buses, Better Cities: How to Plan, Run, and Win the Fight for Effective Transit.
Available at Multnomah County Libraries.
[p. 10] More people choose buses when they are a useful option for them – when it’s reasonably fast, affordable, and convenient. Decades of research by academics and public agencies show that this is determined mostly by factors such as how often the bus runs, how fast it is compared with alternatives, how reliable it is, and how safe riders feel.
[p. 17] Transit service that is useful to most people satisfies seven basic criteria:
- The service goes where you want to go.
- The service runs frequently enough that you don’t have to think about it.
- The service is reasonably fast.
- The service is reliable (you don’t have to worry about major delays).
- You can conveniently walk from the service to your final destination.
- The service is comfortable and feels safe.
- The service is affordable.
Subsequent chapters in the book expand on these seven features, describing how they have been achieved in different transit systems.
Chapter 8 “Building a Transit Nation” begins with a reminder that bus riders “often are those who are furthest from the power, held out of policymaking.” This chapter describes past funding patterns at the federal and state levels.
Conclusion “Winning Mindsets and Growing Movements”
- [p. 130] “A bus system that doesn’t change as its city changes around it is doomed to continually lose ground, like a nest egg that is kept in cash instead of being invested ini a way that gains a return. The good new is that cities can see bus gains in short periods of time. What it takes is alliances of reformers, inside and outside of government.”
- Understand transit systems and power structures [p. 131]
- Advocacy groups should have a campaign mindset [p. 135]
- Get representative, strategic public input [p. 136]
- Get input that is representative of the people who will benefit from better bus service [p. 137]
- Agency staff need a keen sense of the stakeholders who have the power to champion or derail their project
- Build agencies that can deliver [p. 138]
- Grow a stronger transit reform movement [p. 139]
- To win better buses in more cities, we need more wonky transit blogs, more faith-based organizing, more riders’ unions, and more state budget watchdogs.
- We need more ways for transit reformers in one city to learn from the triumphs and pitfalls of others.
- The fastest way to grow the transit reform movement is for local foundations to show sustained interest and energy. [p. 140]
- Advocates need to be strong enough in the fallow years to build power and develop a clear agenda. That strength allows them to be effective when the moment arrives and also helps them create new opportunities on their own.
Steven Higashide. 2019-11-20. “Better Buses, Better Cities”. Video discussion of the book of the same title.
Steven Higashide. 2019-11-04. “How to Win the Fight for Fair and Equitable Transit: Start by dismantling the systemic barriers that disproportionately penalize low-income bus riders”. This is an excerpt from his 2019 book.
Paul Mees. 2009. Transport for Suburbia: Beyond the Automobile Age.
Available at Multnomah County Libraries.
This book argues that the secret of ‘European-style’ public transport lies in a generalizable model of network planning that has worked in places as diverse as rural Switzerland, the Brazilian city of Curitiba and the Canadian cities of Toronto and Vancouver. It shows how this model can be adapted to suburban, exurban and even rural areas to provide a genuine alternative to the car, and outlines the governance, funding and service planning policies that underpin the success of the world’s best public transport systems.
Gabriel Roth, George G. Wynne. 1982. Free Enterprise Urban Transportation.
Benjamin Schneider. 2018-09-06. “CityLab University: Induced Demand”.
Discusses terms like:
- induced demand
- system-optimized vs user-optimized
- price of anarchy
- “Bayen believes that navigation apps are creating more problems than they’re solving in many crowded cities.”
Christof Spieler. 2018. Trains, Buses, People: An Opinionated Atlas of US Transit. Available at Multnomah Public Libraries, Washington County Libraries, and Clackamas County Libraries.
Includes maps of frequency of service against population density as a critical factor that affects ridership levels.
Basics of successful transit:
- Density
- Put transit in densely populated places.
- Increase population density where transit is.
- Activity
- Serve all trips.
- Connect centers.
- Walkability
- Optimize the quarter mile.
- Create complete networks.
- Create a great pedestrian environment.
- Turn front doors to the pedestrian.
- Connectivity
- Design networks to create connections.
- Build hubs.
- Unify fares.
- Frequency
- Provide all-day frequent service.
- Travel Time
- Measure access, not distance.
- Optimize trip time, not speed.
- Provide express service.
- Reliability
- Minimize unreliability due to traffic.
- Minimize unreliability due to boarding.
- Capacity
- Provide enough capacity to meet demand.
- Legibility
- Brand the network.
- Identify lines.
- Identify frequency.
- Identify stops.
- Clarify transfers.
- Simplify networks.
- Create a legible experience.
Recorded presentation on 2019-10-08: YouTube video is a 47-minute presentation in Seattle followed by 11 minutes of questions. This presentation added one more dependency for increasing levels of ridership:
- Inclusivity
The book calls out Portland, Oregon for having poor land use with too much single house zoning, which limits the number of people who can use transit.
Becky Steckler, Rebecca Lewis. 2019. Navigating New Mobility: Policy Approaches for Cities. PDF.
Anthony M. Townsend. 2020. Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car.
Anthony M. Townsend. 2013. Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for A New Utopia.
Available at Multnomah Public Libraries, Washington County Libraries, and Clackamas County Libraries.
[pp. 236-243] “Build Locally, Spread Nationally” section in Chapter 8 “A Planet of Civic Laboratories” describes the beginnings of Code for America to help cities share working code, models, and data.
Anthony M. Townsend. 2013-10-09. “Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for A New Utopia”. Recorded discussion of the book of the same title.
Nick Van Mead. “Riding the Bus in Dar Es Salaam” in Grabar (2019), The Future of Transportation.
Despite the title, this chapter reviews bus rapid transit (BRT) in cities across the world.
[p. 67] Five features are needed to receive a gold ranking from the non-profit Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP):
- bus-only lanes separated from other traffic
- bus lanes in the middle of the road, rather than on the edge
- ticket payment and control at stations, rather than on board
- general traffic kept clear of intersections
- level boarding between the bus and station platform
Jarrett Walker. 2012. Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking About Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives.
Available at Multnomah Public Libraries, Washington County Libraries, and Clackamas County Libraries.
[p. 24] Seven broad expectations that potential riders have of a transit service that they would consider riding:
- It takes me where I want to go.
- It takes me when I want to go.
- It is a good use of my time.
- It is a good use of my money.
- It respects me in the level of safety, comfort, and amenity it provides.
- I can trust it.
- It give me freedom to change my plans.
[p. 26-33] specific things that transit agencies need to provide and measure to meet the seven demands (see Figure 2-1 on p. 27 of the book):
- Stops/Stations: Does it stop near me and my destination?
- Connectivity: Can I get there from here?
- Frequency: What is the maximum waiting time?
- Span: Is it running when I need it?
- Speed or Delay: How much time will we lose along the way?
- Fare: What will it cost?
- Civility: Safety, security, amenity, courtesy, cleanliness, etc.
- Reliability: Doe it run predictably day after day?
- Simplicity: Is the network easy to remember?
- Presentation: Is it easy to learn what I need to know?
[p. 34] 7 phases of a trip:
- Understanding the service, frequency, and fare.
- Accessing (at the origin) where you will board the service.
- Waiting both in terms of time and the quality of the waiting environment.
- Paying and the form of fare collection.
- Riding in terms of length of time and quality of time.
- Connecting, which involves repeating steps 1-5.
- Accessing (at the destination) from the transit stop to your actual destination.
[p. 118] Competing service goals:
- Serve all parts of the community.
- Maximize ridership with a fixed service budget.
Recorded presentation on 2012-07-12 on YouTube video is a 57-minute presentation at the University of Oregon followed by 19 minutes of questions.
- The essential task of transit: “Abundant access without personal vehicles, over distances too far to walk.”
- What if we could see our own access and mobility? Discusses maps by walkscore.com with isochrones for what you can reach in 15 or 30 minutes from a particular point. Note: See also OpenTransit’s implementation of isochrones.
- Five essential aspects of transit:
- Frequency
- Span
- Speed
- Reliability
- Capacity
TriMet. 2019-11-26. Bus lanes speed up trips on 10 TriMet lines.
Delays have decreased by as much as 76 percent after PBOT added a bus and bike-only lane on SW Madison Street and a bus-priority lane on NW Everett Street.
Advocacy and Research Groups
Portland, Oregon: Advocacy and Research Groups
Bus Riders Unite! Portland, Oregon
A membership organization that represents transit-dependent people in the Portland Metropolitan region.
Twitter: @OPALEJOR
Cascade Policy Institute, Portland, Oregon
Cascade’s mission is to develop and promote public policy alternatives that foster individual liberty, personal responsibility, and economic opportunity. Their blog argues strongly against public transit projects:
while favoring projects to support individuals driving cars.
Getting There Together Coalition, Portland, Oregon
Twitter: @ThereTogether
The Getting There Together Coalition was formed in 2017 in response to growing concerns that the Portland metropolitan region was not adequately planning to build the comprehensive infrastructure and transportation system that will alleviate growing freeway congestion, empower working Oregonians to get to jobs, and ensure all the region’s residents prosper from an equitable, sustainable, and climate-smart investment in our future.
The Street Trust, Portland, Oregon
Twitter: @thestreettrust
The Street Trust works in classrooms, on the streets, in city hall and the state legislature encouraging and advocating for safe and convenient walking, biking, and transit options in Portland, Oregon.
Non-Portland Advocacy and Research Groups
Center for Transportation Excellence (CFTE).
Twitter: @CFTEnews
The Center for Transportation Excellence (CFTE) is a clearinghouse for information in support of quality transportation choices. CFTE is committed to two main objectives: (1) defending the merits of transit and (2) equipping local leaders with the information they need to be successful with their public transportation initiatives and ballot measures.
CityLab Transportation
Twitter: @CityLab
“CityLab is committed to telling the story of the world’s cities: how they work, the challenges they face, and the solutions they need.”
Federal Transit Administration
Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP).
Twitter: @ITDPUS and @ITDP_HQ
ITDP specified “The BRT Standard” as a scoring system to recognize high quality bus rapid transit (BRT) systems around the world.
For more information about BRT, see also the Federal Transit Administration’s BRT page and their Bus Rapid Transit Resources.
National Alliance of Public Transportation Advocates
Twitter: @PublicTransportation
A national organization representing grassroots transit coalitions, grassroots transit rider organizations and advocates that support increasing investment in public transportation.
It is not clear to me how NAPTA differs from APTA, since the Member Directory link on the NAPTA site leads to a page on the APTA site.
Next City.
Twitter: @NextCityOrg
Next City is a nonprofit organization with a mission to inspire social, economic and environmental change in cities through journalism and events around the world.
Pittsburghers for Public Transit. 2018. “Riders’ Vision Campaign for Public Transit”.
San Francisco County Transit Authority (SFCTA). Congestion Management Program.
San Francisco County Transit Authority (SFCTA). Congestion in San Francisco is an interactive tool to explore performance metrics for both automobiles and buses on major San Francisco streets and highways.
YouTube video explains how to use the interactive application.
Transit Alliance Miami
Transit Alliance is a non-profit organization advocating for walkable streets, bikeable neighborhoods and better public transit. Our campaigns combine data-driven research, community engagement and policy advocacy to get Miami moving safer, faster and happier.
Higashide (2019) [p. 20-22] speaks highly of such a small group of volunteers affecting significant change through data visualization and good storytelling.
TransitCenter
Twitter: @TransitCenter
TransitCenter works to improve transit in order to make cities more just and environmentally sustainable.
Transit Drives Indy (TDI) Coalition
The Transit Drives Indy (TDI) Coalition, comprised of organizations across Marion County, seeks to educate voters in Marion County, Indiana on the benefits of public transportation and advocate in support of the Marion County Transit referendum.
Transit Wiki
Twitter: @TransitWiki
“The goal of the site is to facilitate information transfer among transit agencies to accelerate the successful implementation of cost-effective strategies to improve transit service.”
I thought a couple of their visualizations are especially interesting:
- Transit Ridership, especially the “Year Over Year Trend by Month” for Los Angeles, Long Beach, Anaheim Urbanized Area.
- Bus Speeds and Performance in California
U.C. Berkeley Transportation Sustainability Research Center.
TSRC was formed to study the economic, social, environmental, and technological aspects of sustainable transportation.
Professional Organizations
American Public Transportation Association (APTA).
APTA is the only association in North America that represents all modes of public transportation, including bus, paratransit, light rail, commuter rail, subways, waterborne services, and intercity and high-speed passenger rail. More than 90 percent of the people using public transportation in the United States and Canada ride APTA member systems
Oregon ITE.
Twitter: @ITEOregon
Transportation professionals in Oregon.
Students in Transportation Engineering & Planning (STEP).
Twitter: @STEPatPSU
Portland State University’s ITE student chapter.
Transit Agencies
San Francisco Municipal Transit Authority (SFMTA), San Francisco, California, United States.
Twitter: @sfmta_muni
TriMet, Portland, Oregon, United States.
Twitter: @trimet
Legislation
Keep Oregon Moving Act. HB 2017.
79th Oregon Legislative Assembly - 2017 Regular Session. Enrolled House Bill 2017. 146-page text of the measure PDF.
Oregon Department of Transportation. 2018-02-27. Highlights of HB 2017. 2-page PDF.
Oregon Department of Transportation. 2017-08-11. Keep Oregon Moving (HB 2017) Frequently Asked Questions. 7-page PDF.
TriMet. Oct. 2018. Tri-County Public Transportation Improvement Plan. 117-page PDF.
Glossary
BRT : Bus Rapid Transit.
“headway” is the amount of time between transit vehicle arrivals at a stop. Headways have a significant impact on how desirable a transit service is, because they effect:
- The time penalty for missing a train or bus
- The amount of planning and preparation needed to use transit and stay on schedule
- The amount of time lost when transit schedules do not directly conform to work, school, or activity schedules
- Average wait times
Copyright © 2020 Jim Tyhurst
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.