I was recently at a friend’s 30th birthday party back in Toronto and I was flying solo. I was at a table of old friends. Maybe I should rephrase that. It was a table of people who were old friends of each other’s. I was the odd man out. They didn’t know me, I didn’t...
Here’s a general rule we like to live by at CUP: No matter how great your numbers are, if you can’t get anyone to read your feasibility study, then your project isn’t feasible. Full stop. It’s a paradox, yes. A feasibility study should not inject itself into the feasibility process. It is supposed to be...
This is a guest post by Ross Edgar. There are few castles in Europe more iconic than Hohenwerfen Castle which stands imposingly over the town of Werfen, 40km (25 miles) south of Salzburg on the Austro-German border. The fortress dates back to 1075 but in more recent years featured in the 1968 film epic ‘Where...
Verisimilitude is a big word for a simple idea. Verisimilitude refers, quite simply, to fictional works of art that don’t replicate reality, but instead create an approximation of reality that feels realer than actual reality. TV shows built around lawyers, crime and courtrooms are notorious for this. CSI, Law & Order and Matlock have implanted...
In city building, there’s perhaps no greater challenge than what we here like to call The Phase 1 Dilemma. The essence of the problem is this: Finding $50,000,000 to fund a ready-made and demonstrably profitable project is (relatively) easy. Finding $50,000 to develop, study and analyze said ready-made and demonstrably profitable project is (virtually) impossible....
A couple weeks back we were doing some research and needed some numbers on ferries. Knowing we have a few readers from Seattle Transit Blog, we fired off an email asking one of their regular contributors for help — after all, Seattle has a massive fleet of ferries. A couple emails back-and-forth over the course...
Ostensibly, I’m supposed to be something of a specialist in the (cough) art and science of using ski lifts as mass public transit. Would it surprise you, then, to learn that for the vast majority of my life I hated skiing? Seriously. It terrified me. If I’m honest with myself, it still kinda’ does. People...
When a public transit line is put out of service for a period of time for upgrades we lose the ability to use that line. It doesn’t matter how much better the line will perform in the future, we still get angry and frustrated because we value the loss of our line more than we...
Ask yourself a quick question: How long have suitcases, trunks and luggage existed for? The answer – of course – is almost hopelessly elusive. Luggage, in some form, has been around since humans have been travelling. Knowing when the first person slapped together an ancient ancestor of Samsonite is impossible to determine. But we can...
A long time ago we asked the question When is a Minute, Not A Minute? In that post we went into how one’s perception of travel time is relative to how they’re actually travelling. As we note in that post, the Transportation Research Board states that a minute of time waiting for a transit vehicle is...