To use CPT properly you have to be creative, original, daring and ultimately a little bit mad. That madness is good and important, especially nowadays when cities viciously compete for talent and tourists. Homogenous, cookie-cutter cities no longer make the grade. People want remarkable. Light Rail (LRT), Subway and Bus technologies are useful (sometimes) but...
When you actually examine the data (Bent Flyvberg‘s data is particularly illuminating) you see that Light Rail Transit’s (LRT) ability to heal a city’s transit woes are negligible at best and non-existent at worst, especially in relation to the costs associated with the technology. So why, then, do we keep coming back to LRT? Well,...
The other day I wrote about how Toronto’s streetcars were like shooting chickadees with cannonballs. In terms of speed, the streetcars were designed to operate at speeds far in excess of what was possible in an urban environment. So how does CPT stack up on our Cannonball Index (that doesn’t exist, by the way, but...
(For those of you not statistically or mathematically inclined, you’ll probably want to skip this post) PPHPD is an acronym for persons per hour per direction and is a great tool for calculating offered capacity of a transit line. Unfortunately, it’s not a term that has any sort of mainstream usage or understanding and that...
The Swiss have an expression to describe solving a problem with far more than is necessary. To do so, they say, is to “shoot a chickadee with a cannonball,” and is a perfect description of what light rail is to the transit planning problem. As an example: Toronto’s current fleet of streetcars were designed to...
If you’ve already got an abandoned or underutilized set of rails in your city, you should use LRT because half your job (and cost) is already taken care of. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Use what you’ve already got to your advantage. If, however, you don’t have an abandoned or underutilized set of rails in your...