Tuesday, August 21, 2007

What I Am Reading These Days

-- An overview of the five winning Urban Partnership Program entries, with pictures and links to the agreements between the feds and the locals.

-- A readable, well-documented discussion of privatization in the public transit sector. The RTA Act as written appears to provide a method for the region to tap into private sector transportation resources to provide service that it is not economical for the current public transit providers to supply. This avenue has not been explored by the Moving Beyond Congestion proponents or anyone else as a way of extending the limited operating funds available to public transit providers in this region. We'll explore in a later post.

-- A comparative survey (Seattle, San Francisco, New York, Chicago) of how supportive cities are to travel by non-auto means of travel--transit, bicycling and walking.

-- A new Transportation Research Board report on transit oriented development commissioned by the Federal Highway Administration. It takes almost 150 well stuffed pages to conclude that dense, heavily mixed-used development near transit stations can increase transit usage and reduce auto dependence. The positive effects of TOD are magnified when parking is constrained physically and/or through price. The study also supports the common sense conclusion that transit ridership levels are highest nearest a transit station and ridership drops off the farther the home or job site is from the station.

What's on your reading list?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

1776, by McCullough. If only Washington had a transit line to move his troops... he could have retreated even quicker.

It is clear by his/her choice of reading that the moderator is a professor. I felt like I was back in grad school reading the scholarly privatization-of-transit article.

Anonymous said...

To the moderator:

Thanks for all those great links. I have a quick question regarding this comparative survey about bicycles. Towards the end of the survey on page 9, it indicates that chicago has 222 miles of dedicated right-of-way bus lanes.

Is this true? The only dedicated lanes I can think of off the top of my head are in the loop on some of those E-W streets, such as Adams and Jackson. But there is no way those add up to 222 miles. Am I forgetting something, or is this figure way off?

Anonymous said...

streetsblog.com is the most useful site on transportation policy I've ever seen. Breath of fresh air.