mindstalk | Entries tagged with transit

What is the most efficient transportation use of street space, e.g. in moving or serving people per hour? I've recently seen various infographics that had numbers, but no sources or calculations. Much better is this Urbanist article, which actually gives its assumptions and calculations. But I feel like doing my own estimates, though I will draw on that article, plus other research I've done. I'll mostly be analyzing a single 3-3.5 meter lane, in city conditions (lots of intersections, thus signalled to flow only half the time.)

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So, there you have it. Granting that in modern society, we'll have at least one car lane on our streets, it's still a valid question as to whether an additional lane should be used for car movement or something else. And in fact almost any other use, except car parking, can serve more people. Probably the easiest approach is to split a lane's worth of space between a bike path and a wider sidewalk, but a bus lane or light rail track would be good as well. If you have two lanes' worth of space, at least at strategic places for BRT stops, then you can have really high BRT capacity.

I spent much of today reading some of the Transit Capacity and Quality of Service Manual, which is a long and 176 MB PDF that I expect to never read all of, since much of it is technical and numeric stuff of interest only if you're actually running a transit agency. But chapter 2 is largely talking about different transit concepts and types, which I did find interesting. And in particular it went into the history and various types of Demand Responsive Transit (DRT), and their productivity or ridership (passengers per vehicle-hour, or 'revenue hour').

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A long post here (2200+ words), but I don’t see a natural division point. Also, apparently this journal style doesn't display lists nicely. I may need a new style, sigh. (No, actually it's DW adding p tags to the li tags.)

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I did a bunch of reading on this yesterday, I think sparked by a NUMTOTS post on yet another microtransit idea. Figured I’d share.

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Took BRT again Friday, to the Anthro museum. Was nice and fast to the bend where it goes through the bosque. I got off a stop early fearing it would get stuck; joke was on me, it zipped ahead and I had an extra 6 minutes to walk. I spent 6 hours in the museum, at least 4 on my feet vs. bathroom or seated breaks, so not like I needed the extra... Museum was neat. The Teotihuacan and Aztec rooms have more bilingual signs than the others. Half the upper floor ethnography rooms were closed, though. :( Found the famous Stone of the Sun aka "Aztec calendar" (it isn't).

Took bus back with trepidation, but it was zippy, in a bus lane, and pulling left properly into the bus lane on Reforma. I have no idea what went wrong my first trip.

Took it again today, riding BRT to almost the end of the line in the other direction, looking out at the city. No signal priority, but otherwise decent BRT. Lots of stops, but having own lane helps a lot. Got off at Garrido, and exploring the Basilica of Guadalupe a bit. Huge internal plaza. Modern style church in use.

Found I was at an intersection of 6 and 7. The 6 station, La Villa, was more elevated and had turnstiles! I discovered that the BRT card machines don't take credit cards.

Took 7 home. Hidalgo stop/station had turnstiles too. Most don't, at least on the 7.

Stops are announced by audio, and on some buses, by a video display as well (at least on the upper floor -- these are double deckers. Not sure if lower floor has video.) This makes Metrobus more advanced than all of Australia including the Brisbane BRT.

I decided I would resort to cash, but La Palma's machine rejected my folded 100 peso bill, so I walked to Insurgentes (train) where the machines do take credit cards. Thought about taking the Metorbus 1 somewhere, but couldn't see a next train display and Google said it was in 30 minutes. This seemed unlikely, but at 9 PM on a Sunday I decided not to push luck.

No free transfers, at least getting off and on the same line. Just 30 cents (6 pesos) each time, but annoying.

I did a survey on RPG.net (It's on a members-only forum so non-signed up people won't be able to see it) on having and needing cars, in the US or elsewhere. Final results:

I have a car, need it, and live in the USA Votes: 155 42.0%
I have a car, don't need it, and live in the USA Votes: 8 2.2%
I don't have a car, need one, and live in the USA Votes: 11 3.0%
I don't have a car, don't need one, and live in the USA Votes: 25 6.8%

I have a car, need it, and live outside the USA Votes: 59 16.0%
I have a car, don't need it, and live outside the USA Votes: 18 4.9%
I don't have a car, need one, and live outside the USA Votes: 5 1.4%
I don't have a car, don't need one, and live outside the USA Votes: 88 23.8%

Total voters
369

The poll was inspired by memories of a German poster saying that while Germany has a lot of cars they were more of a luxury item, possessed because you want one (country drives, easier grocery shopping) rather than because you need it. This was kind of a test of that, and as you can see the claim is somewhat falsified: the majority of non-US car owners still say they need it. Most respondents everywhere either have a car and say they need it, or don't have one and say they don't need one.

OTOH there are differences. 1/4 of non-US owners do in fact say they don't need it, vs like 5% of American owners. More strikingly, 62% of non-US respondents say they don't need a car, vs. 17% of US respondents; 52% of non-US respondents don't have a car and don't need it, vs. 78% of US respondents having a car and needing it. The difference in societies is quite stark.

The poll technology was primitive, thus clumping all non-US countries together, but based on comments and past polls, the main countries are Canada, UK, Ireland, Germany, and Sweden. The site has a liberal tilt; if you're vocally not okay with feminism or queer rights, you get banned, and 10 years ago even the otherwise conservative US posters generally seemed fine with universal health care. OTOH I don't know if it has any particular urban bias, nor the age distribution -- though I've been around long enough that I can say many of the posters can't be that young any more.

Many of the US comments were along the lines of "transit sucks" and "but how can you even go shopping without a car???", what I'm starting to call "virgins talking about sex" discussions.

Crossposts: https://mindstalk.livejournal.com/552904.html

https://www.autoblog.com/2019/10/13/future-transportation-not-cars-autonomous/
(which summarizes and reports on https://nacto.org/2019/09/09/blueprint-for-autonomous-urbanism-2/ If you download the PDF, know that it's 100+ MB in size.)

"The landscape created by car dependence led to increased racial and economic segregation, abysmally high traffic fatalities, increasingly long commutes, and rising global temperatures and emissions."

"If AV technologies focus on private cars and single occupancy vehicles, they will increase congestion and traffic fatalities, exacerbate economic and racial inequalities, and leave us even less equipped to mitigate the impacts of climate change. To avert this dystopian outcome, cities must prioritize the modes that move people efficiently."

13 lanes are required to move 800 vehicles per lane each hour to get to 10,000/hour

"skyports could accommodate 1,000 landings per hour on a footprint of 1 to 2 acres, so NACTO extrapolates that if there are four passengers per vehicle, to achieve the 10,000 passengers per hour 2.5 to 5 acres of space are required"

"If there were two bus-only lanes measuring just 23 feet wide, 80 buses per hour could move the 10,000. And that volume could be handled by a sidewalk or a protected bike lane measuring just 12 to 15 feet wide."

"In urban areas, fixed-route transit in designated rights-of-way is the most efficient way to move people in large numbers.... The bus’s advantage comes from having riders come to it, rather than the other way around."

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No mention of trains, at least in the autoblog summary. A single subway 'lane' could move 20,000-40,000 people per hour! (This gets 30,000 and I think is using low train car capacity; 200 seems better. 6 cars/train * 200/car * 24 trains/hour = 28,800 people/hour; 10 cars and 30 trains/hour would be 60,000 people/hour.)

Looking at the PDF, no mention of trains, though I saw a trolley in a drawing. Oh wait, on page 49 they do mention "on-street transitways, bus or rail", giving them the same capacity... which might be true, but rail would have lower labor costs! Less so if you assume everything's automated in the future, I guess.

Crossposts: https://mindstalk.livejournal.com/543286.html

Rich and Strange Aeons

Entries tagged with transit

best use of a street lane

more on microtransit/DRT

Why microtransit sucks

Paratransit

Colonia Cuauhtémoc, more transit!

needing cars poll result

transporation officials want fewer cars

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