For those of you keen on the next era of transportation, one more seemingly small but notable shift just happened. And it didn’t start on a city street but in a change in mindset. Canadian Transit Forum, the respectable and somewhat traditional journal of the Canadian Urban Transit Association (CUTA), just relaunched itself. With the Spring 2017 issue just released,… Read more »
Some work I’ve been undertaking over the past couple weeks related to a prairie community got me thinking about what the “laws” or principles of transit planning might be. By this I don’t mean the principles of good transit service design: the best practices for designing route networks, schedules, infrastructure, their accompanying plans and so on. Instead, I’m talking about… Read more »
This past Friday I left my role as BC Transit’s Manager of Planning to take on new opportunities as a Senior Transportation Planner & Transit Lead with Calgary-based Watt Consulting Group. Understandably, this change has occupied much of my mind and presented a range of feelings. Gratitude for the opportunities I had to grow over the last 21 years with… Read more »
This past weekend, TransLink’s SkyTrain network in the Metro Vancouver, BC region underwent a pretty sizable series of route and platform changes. The changes are paving the way for the start later this year of service along the new Evergreen Extension and revised supporting bus routes. I thought it would be interesting to look at some of the transit planning… Read more »
There is no greater gift than having a deep connection to the work you do all day. And it’s exactly that kind of connection that I heard from Winnipeg Transit’s Manager of Service Development’s Björn Rådström when I asked him about his job recently: “I don’t believe in the importance of transit because I work at a transit system,” said… Read more »
It’s been a very busy few weeks here at Connecting Dots… and I wanted to follow up on a few threads. Three Minute Math There’s been lots of great comments and discussion on the post about the “just three minute” requests that make transit planners twitchy. Much thanks to all who have read the post, shared it and added their… Read more »
“Oh, but it’s only adds on another three minutes,” is one of those phrases I’ve heard over and over again during my time as a transit planner and scheduler. And like some evil Pavlovian trigger, I can’t help but get bad flashback twitches every time I hear it. The changes that folks request that “will only take three minutes” sound… Read more »
Think quick! What are the most important elements of a really great transit system?! Chances are if you just answered that in your head right now, you might have said things like: frequency, directness, reliability, easy fare payment, easy to use and understand information, consistency, comfort or safety. Some of you might have answered “convenience,” which I would then have… Read more »
It goes without saying that changing technology has had huge impacts over the last 20 years, and its impact on how we plan cities and transit systems is no different. This post is about some of the best parts of those changes…and a love letter to the “old school” practice of marking up maps that I still believe is an… Read more »
An interesting question from Gabriola Island’s community bus group the other day seemed like a great leading off point to go over some transit planning basics.* Let’s then go hand in hand with GERTIE and step our way through some elemental aspects in transit decision making. But first, some background: Who is this “GERTIE” anyway? GERTIE (Gabriola’s Environmentally Responsible Trans-Island… Read more »
I am no fan of lollipops. I’m not talking about the sweet kind, they’re great. Instead, I mean the route structure that looks like a lollipop: the cases where a bus route leaves an otherwise lovely linear path to take riders on a journey twice. Up a stick, around a loop, and right back down the stick (or road) they… Read more »