A thought experiment: Imagine if we created financial incentives for people to experiment professionally with transit? For example: What if, for a transit agency to receive federal/state/provincial funding they had to dedicate at least 5% of their total annual budget to research and development? How would that change things? My recent flaying at the hands...
In his legendary treatise on industrial design The Design of Everyday Things, Donald A. Norman professes his love for camping gear as being some of the best-designed products in the world. Why does he think such gear is so well-designed? Because more often than not, the products are designed by people who actually use them....
A thought experiment: Do we have a transportation supply problem? I’d say no. We’ve got plenty of roads, plenty of transit and plenty of freeways. We do not have a transportation supply problem. (I’m well aware, of course, that there are certain large American and developing world cities that have slim to no transit, but...
I’m going to forego my usual thought experiment introduction and just leave it at this: What happens to cities, transit, cable, etc when Witricity (or something comparable, but with a less awful name) is scaled up and as common as an electrical outlet? Watch, contemplate and discuss:
A thought experiment: Imagine a city that wishes to build a medium capacity transit system in a specific, given configuration. Due, however, to the unique geologic, social, political, cultural and economic state of the area the following applies: An LRT, BRT or CPT system (for the sake of argument, you could include any technology you...
A thought experiment: What if you took anywhere from one third to one half of the commuters off the road each and every workday? How would that change things? Well for starters, your commute would be far more pleasant, whether you were a driver or not. Congestion and delays wouldn’t be nearly as harsh as...
In yesterday’s post I put forth the idea that maybe there is a psychological impact caused by how we design public transit. That there is a kind of Emotional Transit Planning that doesn’t occur but should. That maybe having sunlight and a view would be psychologically more beneficial to the average commuter than being stuck...
A Thought Experiment: Imagine a world 30 years from now (not so far into the future) where there is no such thing as public transit in whatever city you happen to live in. How did it happen? Why? What caused public transit’s demise? Think it’s impossible? Ask Clayton County, Georgia. Or the flip side: Image...
According to the Transportation Research Board’s Transit Capacity and Quality of Service Manual, wait times for transit are around 2 times more onerous to riders than actual in-vehicle time. They see that ratio rise to 2.5 times when wait times are coupled to transfers. With that in mind, how long is the following journey: A...