Keywords: transportation demand management, bicycle planning, pedestrian planning, transit, urban form, parking, urban economics, finance, prioritisation, accessibility

Keywords: energy

A very interesting read. Litman raises a number of issues associated with housing that I hadn't considered-my first reaction is to question Vancouver's downtown development patterns. Are parking requirements responsible for the tower fad, by making townhouse and four-story apartment development uneconomic for developers? On interesting bit of trivia: curb cuts reduce onstreet parking capacity. His parking management solutions are quite valuable and innovative ideas, and the studies he cites in Victoria and Mississauga are useful; I should follow up on all of his references. Of the management solutions, the two ideas I found novel were: shared parking, where apartments and businesses share spaces due to opposite peak demand times - very practical for residential downtowns; transportation management associations, where a neighbourhood organisation is formed to trade parking in a neighbourhood. I was initially convinced by his arguments about reducing developer incentive to create low-income housing, but I'm now a little skeptical; figure 12, in particular, says to me that in a scenario where 0 parking spaces are required, developers will have a huge incentive to produce high income housing, since the relative profit difference will be so much greater. Of course, this ignores the entire demand side of the equation. Overall, I think more analysis is needed to determine the real effect on developers.

Keywords: parking, urban planning, transportation demand management, equity

Keywords: transportation demand management, equity, insurance

Keywords: transport planning, induced travel

Some interesting analysis. It's primarily a critique of another paper, “Great Rail Disasters” by Randal O'Toole, which I'm not familiar with; apparently, the paper condemns rail transit as cost ineffective, but its analysis is fundamentally flawed. In the end, the flaws boil down to two differences: 1) O'Toole values mobility more than accessibility; and 2) he's quite ready to distort statistics to make an argument.

Probably the most interesting part of his analysis is Figure 13, showing that “in Bus Only and Small Rail cities, traffic congestion costs tend to increase with city size [...] but Large Rail cities do not follow this pattern. They have substantially lower congestion costs than comparable size cities. As a result, New York and Chicago have about half the per capita congestion delay as Los Angeles.”

Tables 6 and 7 is also very interesting, showing the total subsidy to bus and rail systems, and a lower bound on the total benefits from each.

Litman's notes comparing bus rapid transit and rail are interesting, particularly his statistic showing that people are more willing to stand on rail systems, allowing more passengers per vehicle. His notes that rail does not subtract from bus systems are also interesting, showing that cities with large and small rail tend to spend more per-capita on transit, and hence that rail does not necessarily reduce bus system performance. (Although I'm sure there are cases where that happens!)

I still have some questions about one part of his analysis: his argument proceeds by defining “large rail” cities as those with transit mode share of 20%+ with rail making up more than half of the transit trips. He then argues that these cities have lower vehicle-miles, higher transit trips, etc., typically due to the land use impacts of the rail systems. However, there are elements of a circular argument here: it's possible that the causation runs in the other direction, and land uses cause higher transit mode share, and hence shift certain cities into the large rail category. (Personally, I don't believe that's the case-I think that rail does cause denser land use. But the argument may need to be rephrased to make this unambiguous.) I need to think about this more before I can be certain that there actually is a flaw in his reasoning, though. Regardless, I don't think it's a big flaw-it's a difficult subject to tackle perfectly, and his analysis is generally quite sound.

Litman includes a reference to the spreadsheet containing his calculations! This could be quite useful for learning how this analysis is done.

Keywords: transport planning, transit, rail

A very good, modern approach to bicycle facility design, from a North American perspective. Some really excellent diagrams of traffic calming designs; a good description of right-turn conflicts (p. 3-20).

Keywords: bicycle planning, pavement marking, traffic calming, traffic controls

Keywords: transport planning, transit, canada

Keywords: transportation demand management, finance, environmental economics

Keywords: bicycle planning, pedestrian planning