@swizzard.pizza is using model to mean "data model"—essentially "what does each row represent?" and "what attributes (columns) do you capture about each row?"

I did two on a regular basis when I lived in the Seattle burbs. But the frequencies weren't pleasant

The Museum of American History has a transportation in America exhibit, but it's funded by the usual suspects and shows the history of transportation in America as a march toward the Interstate

HF 4449 from Rep. Katies Jones from Minneapolis would require the Twin Cities region to:
- use service-led planning for transportation
- create a multi-year (8) transportation investment framework for funding transit and roads
- require TOD
www.revisor.mn.gov/bills/94/202...

tokyo metro handles ~7 million riders daily. this is not because they made it free and easy and everyone can do anything on the subway. this is because the subway is very fast, very reliable, has incredible coverage, and thus MEDIAN PEOPLE USE IT

There’s this discussion in “Downtown” by Fogelson where people start complaining that skyscrapers are bringing too much traffic downtown and the businessmen counter that actually they do most of their traveling via elevator in these new buildings so they lessen the demand on streets and streetcars.

The engineering schematic

Fun find this afternoon: In 1957, the Port Authority did the engineering work to link the downtown PATH to the Lexington Avenue subway local tracks.

This is apparently the built environment two blocks away from a station on a multibillion light rail extension 😮‍💨

Just on our way to the Shoreline South light rail station with maybe a foot of usable sidewalk on 145th.

Pretty fascinating chart.

I wonder what explains the massive variance in federal share of funding for these light rail projects. Some finance quirk? Strength of WA’s congressional delegation?

New rules mean many DC restaurants are closing streateries The District made streateries permanent. But restaurant owners say the rules are too costly and complicated to keep them up.

DC implemented a new policy for its streeteries that cost restaurants $20,000 to implement.

The result: virtually every restaurant eliminated their outdoor dining, many have reduced their hiring, & now a few cars can park more easily.

Congrats on the successful policy change, DC government!

Total ridership is still a decent ways away from the 2019 peak, but it has just about equalized 2011 levels, which is something—most large agencies saw ridership decline during the 2010s

Ridership charts by agency, broken down by mode.

It was also interesting to see the extent of Community Transits ridership recovery even after some of its highest profile commuter buses were replaced by Lynwood Link:

Stacked chart showing the breakdown of the total ridership figure by mode. Link has more than recovered, buses haven't. But buses were/are the vast majority of ridership

It's pretty clear that the loses of bus ridership haven't been outweighed by Link's extensions. Here's a plot of the breakdown:

(this makes sense—buses still serve far more people. But it is interesting to see that total ridership is already back to 2011 levels, albeit in an MSA that's ~20% larger)

I was curious what this looked like in the context of the poor bus recovery so I made my own NTD plots. Here's the top-line number including all KCM/CT/PT/ST unlinked trips:

That's insane.

Why Japan has such good railways - Works in Progress Magazine Japan's railways are the finest in the world. Other countries can copy its formula.

Great article on railways and wider urban planning challenges worksinprogress.co/issue/why-ja...

Unfortunately those toll lanes were planned with or without Stride and have already been built north of Bellevue. (They're building the part to the south now)

Raises the question of whether Stride will shift people back to the bus because iirc it won't have those deviations

Screenshot of transit app highlighting the northern portion of sound transit route 535 to bellevue

Screenshot of the alderwood mall deviation for the 535

Screenshot of the UW Bothell deviation of the 535

I suspect that's because the bus has pretty large deviations (to serve a major mall and a university)

I just checked and it used to run every 5 minutes at peak lol (from 2013 to just before COVID)

There's a reason this was high on the priority list for Link

Charts showing passenger boarding capacity per trip eastbound and westbound on the 550 by time of day. Both eastbound and westbound have morning and evening peaks, if slightly smaller in the reverse commute direction.

For what it's worth, 550 ridership used to be relatively balanced. Here's a chart from before ridership melted down around ~2019 (due to the loss of dedicated infra to link):

Microsoft leadership has been on the urbanism train for a while. They helped fund Link stuff and are also the major driver behind HSR conversations in cascadia

That's not really the state—the state let's Sound Transit tax its region but *state* funding for transit was near zero through the aughts and minimal until like 2022

Bear in mind, American light rail projects in the 2000s had on average zero cost overrun. This isn't something unique to Scandinavia, the paper just looks at Scandinavia because there are a lot of projects there with reliable ex ante and ex post figures to compare.

In Mountain View this morning and wandering why we don’t have SB 79 for office space near transit.

Because the auto-centric job dispersal continues in spite of rail electrification.

Transit Bodhisattva: the one path to happiness is adapting land use to fit the service we already have.

lol

I don't know if it was a complete non starter—they almost did it before killing the streetcar entirely.

But they would've been compromised by that point by poor parking/double parking the adjacent parking lanes. Tbh I'm not sure that curb lanes would really have saved much time because of that

Italy's first HSR, the Direttissima, took 25 years from initial fundings (mid-1960s) to full completion (1991) but it doesn't really matters because every new segment could bring some benefits in reduced travel times snd additional capacity. Rail works best as a complete network.