Link fun for a gloomy Monday
November 16, 2009
Link fun for a gloomy Monday
November 16, 2009
I find myself with a glut of transport-related links on this gloomy Monday. Let’s share!
- Check out the video above. A guy was continually spotted dancing at a bus stop like Michael Jackson, and so someone documented it.
- Here’s a New York Times article about couples living in different parts of the city, and how a long or short public transit ride can make or break the relationship.
- Kind of old, but Travis Ruse’s Express Train photoblog from 2007 is just gorgeous. It’s daily photos from his NYC train commute.
- Bibliometro! Borrow books at tiny libraries in Madrid train stations!
- Downtown Seattle gets a light rail connection to Sea-Tac airport in December. Sound Transit will open its Link light rail service to the airport on Saturday, December 19, just in time for the holidays.
- Alex sent along three videos of biking the Golden Ears Way bike route this summer. Here’s the Golden Ears Way, the east on-ramp and sidewalk, and the roundabouts plus west sidewalk.
- Jeff B sent three time-lapse videos of summer rides on the Expo Line, Millennium Line, and Canada Line.
- Jim sent this link to 250 great movies drawn as a subway map.
- In gloomier news, transit in Canada is having a rough time. Fare hikes are proposed (or approved) in Edmonton, Saskatoon, Victoria, Toronto, Ottawa, Hamilton, and more. (Torontonians are apparently hoarding tokens in anticipation of the hike, too!) Calgary isn’t raising fares, but will see cuts in service and loss of full-time staff positions.
- Lobby group Transportation For America has a report called Stranded at the Station, which looks at the grisly recent transit stats for American transit systems too. Apparently 90 per cent of U.S. transit systems have raised fares or cut service in the past year – eep.
Haha…..its nice and cheerful…then ur hit with the sad news at the end….
Hey jhen! On a unrelated note, I thought of a friday question: how do you acess your bus info? With the options: on my phone, using my app on my phone, online, texting, phoning in or other…… I dono if that was done yet….
Good suggestion! I’ll keep that question in mind.
Very random idea about levying cars, a timing meter can be installed in all cars to track the time the engine is turned on, and levied at say $0.25 an hour. For a person who commutes an hour a day (264 hours a year) and uses their vehicle 200 hours a year for personal use, they would be levied $116 a year. It’s all about bang for the buck, 25 cents probably won’t do much to discourage driving but if you compare, driving on a wide open highway you can go 100km for 25 cents, whereas in the city you may drive 20km for 25 cents. As the levy rises, people may be more inclined to use transit or other forms of transport during times when they won’t get the most bang for their levy dollar, and use their vehicles for personal use instead. Every year before someone gets their car insurance renewed, they have to get their meters read. Some engineering will have to be done to tamper proof the meters but I don’t reckon a device would cost more than $50. Perhaps odometer reading would be a lot easier but I don’t think pleasure use of vehicles should be as penalized.
Another method could be to put license plate readers in zones and proportionally splitting odometer numbers among the different zone rates — Downtown Congestion Zone (say 1 cent/km), General Metro Vancouver Zone (0.3 cents/km), and of course the free zone beyond Metro Vancouver borders, so for someone who drives 25,000km a year, spends 2 weeks a year outside Metro Vancouver, 9 hours a workday in Downtown Vancouver, and balance of the time in Metro Vancouver, their levy would be $67.80+$51.66 = $119.46 a year. If another person (like me lol) just plain did a lot of driving 25,000km but took transit to work downtown and never drove their, their levy would only be $75 a year.
Oh…I forgot one choice: using the printed timetable…
Donald, I think the fuel levy achieves what your proposing without the complexities. Especially, rewarding fuel efficient vehicles over the larger SUV’s.
Then again I’m sure drivers have a similar attitude towards transit riders through applying distance based fares. What do you think about having additional fare zones around transit rich downtown, SFU-Burnaby Mountain, and UBC? Do you think that is fair? What about placing tolls on cyclists over the Burrard bridge?
The airport will be a getting a new fair zone zone with it’s surcharge. Will there be others?
The TTC wants jack it’s fares to $3? Now there some gloomy news :(. Whats worse is that the TTC is proposing to stop the hoarding method by limiting one-time sales of tokens up to 10. One of the things I like about TransLink’s system are the transfers which allow you to use up to 90 minutes. Not so much in Toronto, you can transfer from one bus or streetcar to another but not the third. :(
I’m also quite surprised that Edmonton and other major cities are also considering fare hikes. I guess even Canada’s mass transit system is not immune to the recession.
North Americans have decided that roads are 1st, 2nd and 3rd priority and if there’s any money left over to put buses on those roads then it’s OK. Transit systems are being forced to raise fares and cut service because the funding models developed to build and maintain roads don’t leave anything for transit when times get tough. It’s happening everywhere because the same models exist across the continent.
If we collectively placed more value on moving people instead of vehicles, more value on saving breathable air and farmable land then things would be very different.
The money we all spend on car related infrastructure and operating expenses would build a dozen new light rail lines every year. Within a decade we could have 100 lines criss-crossing the region and, like the people of Manhattan, most of us would be able to live without a car.
Jhenifer – I wouldn’t call Calgary’s transit cuts massive. They’re talking about cutting 21,500 hours out of 2.4 million, so less than 1% cut in service. Nothing near what Translink was threatening if it didn’t get money to continue.
Zack – TTC now has a timed transfer policy – no longer limited to direction or route as in the past. Also, Toronto has no barrier, no proof transfer between the subway and buses at most stations.
David: Sure, I can remove the word “big” in the Calgary sentence. Still a pretty significant number of service hours though!
Btw, are the TTC transfers really time-based now? From their website it looks like there’s just a pilot project on one route with the timed transfers.
Good point about the pilot. When I was there I rode on the 192 and the transfers were from another route. I assumed they were just using up old transfers as they’d switched to time-based so the route number and direction was no longer important. I transferred to the subway which was behind the barrier, so no proof of payment was required. So I don’t know if the pilot was expanded.
David: Probably the driver forgot to switch the paper transfers to that route. Same thing happened to me when I was on the 96 Wilson route (my former route)and yet the transfers were from the 165. And you’re right, there are no barriers between buses and the subway. I had no problem with that when I transferred to the subway.I was just mentioning about transferring between surface routes. But according to the website it seems like the pilot project is only on the 512 St Clair route.
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