Posts Tagged: Urban Planning

28
Jun

2010

Never Mind The Real World

If I gave you the choice between a transit technology that could carry 20,000 people and a technology that could carry 6,000 which would you choose? Clearly, youd choose 20,000.

Or what if I gave you the choice between a transit technology that operated at 100 km/hr or one that operated at 35 km/hr? Obviously youd opt for the faster one. Faster is better because faster means you get where youre going sooner.

And thats the problem.

Humans are irrational – no secret there – and were so hard-wired to grab the most of anything, well almost always opt for that which gives us the most. It doesnt matter that we dont even like three-quarters of whats on the Mandarin’s all-you-can-eat buffet, we just like to know the option is there.

So too with transit planners.

Theoretically, Light Rail carries between 6,000 – 20,000. Just ask Professor Vukan R. Vuchic, one of the only people to ever write a textbook on transit planning. His Urban Transit series of textbooks constantly state that LRT carries between 6,000 and 20,000 people. He also states that they operate at “maximum speeds (of) 70 km/hr or higher.”

Never mind that there’s no LRT system in North America that carries more than 4,000.

Never mind that there’s never been an LRT system built that carries 20,000 people.

Never mind the cost involved in staffing and purchasing vehicles that arrive every 1-3 minutes; the figure necessary to reach 20,000 people.

Never mind that the posted speed limit in most cities is 40-50 km/hr. To Vuchic, what matters is that Light Rail emcan/em go 70 km/hr or higher.

Never mind that Vuchic himself says that the average operating speed of LRT is as low as 15 km/hr.

Never mind that LRT stations are spaced 300 – 1,000 meters apart, completely preventing vehicles from reaching those top speeds.

Never mind stop signs, traffic lights, jaywalkers, slow-moving grandmothers, speeding teenagers and streetcar drivers who stop to grab a coffee while on the job.

In other words: Never mind the real world. Completely ignore what actually happens in cities and instead focus solely on what is theoretically possible. Focus on the text book and the equations in it, not the city block and the people on it.

Numbers like Vuchics are constantly used to justify technologies like LRT and we flock to them because they promise us the fastest, biggest, best technology around. It doesnt matter that the numbers prove otherwise. If you give people a narrative that appeals to them, they’ll believe it. Its cheap and easy politics and it’s not fair, but that’s the way it is. Nobody ever said life was fair.

When you’re talking about billion dollar contracts and thousands of jobs, should you really expect government and industry to play fair?

Cable can carry more people than the industry publishes. It can also travel at speeds faster than what they publish. Ridiculously simple innovations like double decker vehicles would double the capacity over night. But the cable industry seems to want to play fair. They only want to talk about what they’ve done in the past, not what they’re going to do in the future.

That’s admirable, but it hurts the industry’s chances.



Want more? Purchase Cable Car Confidential: The Essential Guide to Cable Cars, Urban Gondolas & Cable Propelled Transit and start learning about the world's fastest growing transportation technologies.

Light Rail & Streetcars / Research Issues / Urban Planning & Design
13
Comments
22
Jun

2010

Why Outliers Are Important

Bent Flyvbjerg is a scholar in Denmark and an expert in cost-overruns and demand-shortfalls in public infrastructure projects. In one of his more recent publications (“Cost Overruns and Demand Shortfalls in Urban Rail and Other Infrastructure”), he demonstrates the dramatic demand shortfalls that most urban rail infrastructure is met with. According to his study, actual ridership was, on average, 50.8% lower than forecasted.

Rightly, Mr. Flyvbjerg excludes two statistical outliers as each “strongly diverge” from the figures. Whereas most other systems studied experienced dramatic demand shortfalls, these two outliers experienced demand that was 158 and 60% greater than forecasted.

Now I’m not asking Mr. Flyvbjerg to include those outliers. It is standard statistical practice to forget about them. I do, however, want to know what happened in those two instances; particularly given that each outlier was in a German city. Don’t you want to know what the Germans are doing right? Don’t you want to know the story behind these two abnormalities? Don’t you want to know what made these cities successful against the overwhelming evidence that suggested they should fail?

Don’t ignore statistical outliers just because they corrupt your models and poison your results. Maybe your model’s wrong. Forget about your model for a second and instead ask yourself why did that happen?

A statistical outlier, whether positive or negative, is something that is unique within your models, and uniqueness is deserving of inquiry. There is a story there. And in that story are answers to important questions.

Predictable results may make for easy answers, but (hopefully) your boss/client/supervisor isn’t looking for easy answers. And if he is, those answers are probably incorrect.

We need more people who don’t really care about easy answers and predictable results. Change occurs when people look for the unpredictable and then wrestle to find the story lurking somewhere underneath.



Want more? Purchase Cable Car Confidential: The Essential Guide to Cable Cars, Urban Gondolas & Cable Propelled Transit and start learning about the world's fastest growing transportation technologies.

Thoughts / Urban Planning & Design
0
Comments
13
Jun

2010

A Tale of Two Planning Professors

These are both 100% true stories:

During my undergrad, I took a course called “The Changing Geography of China.”  Of the sixty or so students in the class, I was one of a dozen white people in the room (maybe).  Much to the obvious confusion of the class, one of those dozen was the professor; a white-as-snow 40-ish woman with a last name of Irish ancestry.

The first thing she said to the class was this:  Okay, listen, I know what you’re thinking:  What’s with the white girl?  So let’s get this out of the way here and now:  I’ve spent over 12 years of my life living in China and I speak, read and write Cantonese and Mandarin better than you or your parents ever could.  So let’s get on with today’s lesson.

Contrast that with the following similar (yet wholly different) experience:

During my first week of post-graduate planning school we were given a three day session on environmental planning.  The lectures were given by a 30-something sessional professor who informed us that not only did she commute alone, by car almost 90 minutes (each way!) per day but she also owned a house perched atop the Oak Ridges Moraine.

For those that don’t know, the Oak Ridges Moraine, notably, is a strip of prime agricultural and environmentally-sensitive land north of Toronto, Ontario.  The government had recently passed legislation barring development on the Moraine, receiving plaudits and awards from environmentalists and planners across the globe. Someone in the class asked how she felt she had any moral authority to lecture us on the value of environmental planning when she, herself, seemed to be the epitome of everything environmental planning is against.

She shrugged her shoulders, rolled her eyes and said: Yeah, well, what are you going do?

One of these two professors is admired and lauded by her students. So much so that  she was recently nominated by said students for a major education award and received tenure at a top Canadian university. Which one do you think it was?

Planners are great ones for telling people how to live their lives. In fact, the entire profession exists to do so: Live here, not there. Live this way, not that way. Build to this height, not that height. Follow this signal, not that signal. Commute this way, commute that way. Use this kind of toilet, not that kind of toilet. Et cetera this way, not et cetera that way.

So if you work in a profession whose entire existence is built to instruct others on how to live their lives, you yourself better live the life you’re telling others they should be living. Or at the very least, a close approximation. Otherwise, how can you possibly expect anyone to take your recommendations (or you) seriously?



Want more? Purchase Cable Car Confidential: The Essential Guide to Cable Cars, Urban Gondolas & Cable Propelled Transit and start learning about the world's fastest growing transportation technologies.

Thoughts / Urban Planning & Design
0
Comments
03
Jun

2010

The Gleagle Has Landed

The Gleagle IG

Recently the Chinese motor company Geely showcased their Gleagle IG concept car at the Shanghai Auto Show. This three-seater is made of steel, is equipped with a solar panel hood and will cost only $2,250 USD.

It’s said to be the cheapest car on the planet, 10% cheaper even than the Tata Nano (formerly the cheapest car on the planet).

Economic scarcity is a funny thing. When something that’s scarce (expensive) becomes abundant (cheap), that abundance simply causes something else to become scarce. Caracas may have the cheapest gasoline on the planet . . . but they also have some the worst traffic humanity’s ever seen.

So what happens when our cars become cheaper than expensive bikes? Better yet: What happens when they become cheaper than public transit?

Will never happen, you say? When was the last time you saw a transit operator drop their fares?

As long as transit operators keep raising their fares (and lowering their level of service) and car companies keep driving down the price and size of vehicles, eventually the price of a car is going to be cheaper than an annual transit pass.

And that changes everything. Make an electrically-powered Gleagle and suddenly transit loses whatever moral high ground it once had. It’s at that point that scarcity kicks in again. After all, when cars are abundant, road space becomes scarce.

The scarcity of roads is one of the only things that will keep public transit alive (at least in its current form) to see the 22nd Century. But once roads are that clogged with micro-cars, vespas, cyclists and pedestrians how are Light Rail trains, Streetcars and Buses going to get around? They won’t.

At that moment transit will be forced to make a decision: Do we go below or above the traffic? There’s no other option.



Want more? Purchase Cable Car Confidential: The Essential Guide to Cable Cars, Urban Gondolas & Cable Propelled Transit and start learning about the world's fastest growing transportation technologies.

Analysis
0
Comments
31
May

2010

A Toronto Gondola System

A while back I wrote a post soliciting people to contribute their own Cable Propelled Transit conceptual ideas. Aside from some uptake from the good people over at neoHouston, there was little interest. No wonder: I never offered my own conceptual. Kinda’ hypocritical, huh?

So, without further ado . . . Here’s how I’d use cable in my fine hometown of Toronto, Canada. To readers not from Toronto, please just play along:

Read more



Want more? Purchase Cable Car Confidential: The Essential Guide to Cable Cars, Urban Gondolas & Cable Propelled Transit and start learning about the world's fastest growing transportation technologies.

Toronto Metrocable
47
Comments
30
May

2010

Cost Is Relative With Urban Infrastructure

The good folks over at US Infrastructure have invited me to blog for them on occasion. So, of course, the first blog has to do with the Caracas Metrocable and how various people (including The Economist) choose to portray the costs of civil works projects.

Please check out Cost Is Relative With Urban Infrastructure.



Want more? Purchase Cable Car Confidential: The Essential Guide to Cable Cars, Urban Gondolas & Cable Propelled Transit and start learning about the world's fastest growing transportation technologies.

Analysis / Blogs & Other Sites
0
Comments
18
May

2010

Calgary’s Plus 15 Network: The Key to Urban Gondolas?

The Calgary Plus 15 Network. Public Domain.

A Plus 15 bridge with abstract metal sculptures in Calgary's downtown core. Image by Spatial Mongrel.

Calgary, Alberta, Canada is a city of around 1 million people. It’s the financial centre of Canada’s petrol economy and is very, very cold. Average temperatures range from a low of -15°C (5°F) to a high of 10°C (49°F).

Calgarians are therefore blessed with a network of elevated walkways called the Plus 15 System. This network enables movement throughout the financial district and downtown core without stepping outside. The Plus 15 network’s 16 km of length and 59 bridges make it the largest such system in the world.

The Plus 15, whose name refers to the height at which these bridges are above street level, is not without controversy. Some feel that the network’s 16 km and 59 bridges rob the street of pedestrian traffic and life. But that’s not the point or reason I wish to draw attention to this system.

Instead, consider the following images:

A multistory bridge is just one of 59 bridges that make up Calgary's Plus 15 Network. Image by the Calgary Downtown Association.

Image by John Vetterli.

Image by fredthechicken.

Image by kootenayvolcano.

Some of the bridges are purely utilitarian and others are architectural marvels. But again, that’s not the point. In yesterday’s post we discussed the new Baden Gondelbahn proposal. One of the images from that new proposal was this:

Image by PD via Tages Anzeiger.

See the point now? Integrating Urban Gondolas and Cable Propelled Transit into dense urban environments may not be so difficult after all.



Want more? Purchase Cable Car Confidential: The Essential Guide to Cable Cars, Urban Gondolas & Cable Propelled Transit and start learning about the world's fastest growing transportation technologies.

Analysis / Design Considerations
3
Comments