By bgtothen on November 22, 2008
So what do you think? Can I get it’s about time in the house!
One Bus Away is starting to get attention.
Seattle Magazine gave it a great review. Hopefully Metro is taking notice.
ps sorry for the horrible picture. I’ll get a better one soon.
Posted in bus trolley, piercecounty, profits, railroads, ride free zone
By bgtothen on November 18, 2008
This quarter I’m taking a travel demand forecasting class. It has been very theory heavy but luckily our final project is hands on. The goal of the project is to reduce emissions, total delays and VMT with a hypothetical city. The catch is that we have to do this with as little money as possible and oh by the way population and employment will increase by 50%.
Well today I slaved away in the dungeon, ie the CEE computer lab for a few hours and I got a good way through the project already. We have the authority to control where growth is located. My strategy was to increase the percent of intra-zonal (ie local trips, which are not loaded onto the regional transportation network) by focusing all growth in three TAZ’s one of which was the CBD. I also tried to balance housing and employment so all of the TAZ’s have a good balance. This included the smaller TAZs as well. These strategies are essentially what smart growth is all about. Put people closer together and close to everything they want.
I haven not made changes to the roadway or transit network yet but as you can see below smart growth principles have cut delay in half (even below current levels) and substantially reduced VMT. Emissions did not go down much because cold starts are the major cause of emissions and I didn’t cut down much on this yet.
Base / New / Change / Change%
Benefit:
VMT= 355242 / 249295/ -105948 / -29.82
Delay= 19010 / 778 / -18232 / -95.91
Emission= 0.85 / 0.81 / -0.04 / -4.58
Also look at the difference of intra-zonal trips and average travel times. This approach reduced the average trip travel time from 12 minutes to 5 minutes. Not to shabby! We’ll see what happens when I get the transit network working. I’ll post again when I complete this project.
Base
Total / Intra / Avg Time
HBW = 122673 / 39.81% / 13.08
HBO = 136416 / 64.48% / 8.04
NHB = 170281 / 66.29% / 14.69
TOT = 429370 / 58.15% / 12.12
New
Total / Intra / Avg Time
HBW = 122673 / 56.73% / 6.96
HBO = 136416 / 70.26% / 4.45
NHB = 170281 / 75.62% / 3.77
TOT = 429370 / 68.52% / 4.90
I show this just as an example. This is a hypothetical example and there were a lot of simplifications that went into the model.
Posted in Boo Ya!, circulaters, economy, railroads, snow, Surface Transit Alternative, systems
By bgtothen on March 3, 2008
Thanks to those people that have gotten back to me already. Some people have said that the most useful thing would be information at the bus stop. This is an example of what that could look like.
Posted in iPhone, piercecounty, profits, railroads, tolls
By bgtothen on March 2, 2008
Over the last few days I have been working on creating this map for my independent study. What I tried to do is combine a simplified system map with the Mybus SMS service.
I realized through my studies that transit information consist of spatial and temporal information. Thus you have a route map to show where the bus goes and you have a table to show when the bus will be there. Subway systems essentially eliminate the need to know temporal information because they come so often. This allows them to simply focus on the spatial aspect of the transit system which is much easier to understand. That is why everyone loves subway maps. Using Mybus SMS I’m able to do the same thing.
This map only covers downtown, capitol hill and the u district but if I get a good reaction I will make a city wide map. Please let me know what you think.
Posted in iPhone, piercecounty, PPP, Public Private Partnership, railroads
Sound Transit Latest News
Recent Comments