June 14th, 2010 |
» As gondolas catch on in South America, should other cities search for ways to make transit trips more interesting?
When I lived in New York, I took the subway from Atlantic Avenue in Downtown Brooklyn to my office at Union Square everyday. It’s easy to get between the two — there are several different lines that make the trip in about fifteen minutes — but I would inevitably choose to walk out of my way to take the N Broadway train rather than the closer 4 and 5 Lexington Avenue lines.
There’s a simple explanation: whereas the N soars high
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April 30th, 2010 |
» Service changes on Long Island would reduce the number of one-stop rides into Manhattan but lower operations and capital costs.
Though the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) is the busiest commuter rail operation in the United States, with more than 300,000 daily boardings, its 700 miles of track make frequent services to all parts of the island too expensive to be economically viable. The stations at the end of the system’s two longest branches — to Greenport and Montauk, at the eastern tips of the island — are out of convenient commuting distance to Manhattan, so the LIRR provides
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April 9th, 2010 |
» Can ferries play a useful role in the broader public transportation system?
Most major cities are situated along some body of water — usually a river or two, often a lake or the ocean. There’s a good reason for this: waterways played an important role historically as transportation links for people and freight. They also allowed connections across barriers insurmountable by ground-based transportation; in the early 1900s, for example, ferries were the only mode of transport between Manhattan and Northern New Jersey. But new technologies allowing the construction of underwater road and rail tunnels and the general improvement of
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March 10th, 2010 |
» This guest post by Alon Levy is the third in a three-part series on a potential New York Regional Rail Network. Check out the First and Second Pieces.
In a two-part series on The Transport Politic, I previously argued that to improve Greater New York’s commuter rail service, the agencies controlling it should orient their capital plan to emphasize good service on existing lines instead of spending on outbound extensions, with a special focus on through-routing. Such a system would remodel New York’s commuter rail along the lines of the Paris RER or a German
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March 4th, 2010 |
» The project represents a marked advance for a city that’s been reluctant to invest in fully separated lanes for its buses.
When American transit planners begin working on a new transit capital project, they’re often required to undertake what’s called an alternative analysis, a study whose purpose is to identify the appropriate route and technology for a specific corridor. It’s an open secret among people in the industry that while these reports often provide useful information about where exactly to place a new line, the choice of vehicle mode is almost always predetermined.
This
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February 22nd, 2010 |
» The city’s largest borough currently suffers from a large gap in service, but relatively inexpensive improvements could address those problems well.
Though New Yorkers overall are used to some of the longest commute times in the country, residents of southeast Queens are particularly affected. The inhabitants of this large segment of the borough between JFK Airport and Jamaica, from Brooklyn to the city line, have average travel times to work of more than 50 minutes. That’s each way.
It’s a terrible situation, especially since so many people in the pretty dense neighborhood rely on
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