regional planning

Bellevue

By Frank on January 20, 2010

Vintage Seattle has a great postcard of 1970s Bellevue. Bellevue’s growth over the last few years is a good reminder of how much the region’s changed, and how much the center of gravity has shifted away from Seattle over the years.* In the 1960s, you could build a Seattle-centric transportation system. No more.

Ironically, despite greatly increasing its stature and urbanity vis-a-vis Seattle, Bellevue still seems interested in pushing transit out to the hinterlands, rather than have it run where people live.

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* Obviously Seattle’s still the big dog, but in relative terms its unipolarity has declined as the rest of King County has grown in population.

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BART Widget

By bgtothen on January 21, 2008

As a result of dropping differential equations this quarter I decided to start a 10 credit independent study on transit information usability for my urban planning minor. I started doing some preliminary research tonight and stumbled upon the most amazing widget I have seen (http://worrydream.com/bartwidget/).

This widget plans your trip in an easy to understand manner. Just drag and drop your starting and ending locations. It tell you where to transfer and how much the trip will cost. It will even set off an alarm to let you know when you should leave. Its elegant and easy to use. Sorry PC, it only works on macs.

For the past months I have been really interested in how transit information affect a users understand of the service. Transit information ranges from cheap and easy things like adding “frequent service” or approximate headways to bus schedules, to expensive things like implement system wide Nextbus service like what MUNI did.

I’m doing primary research for the next month or so. If you have any information that you think might be useful please let me know.

PS Now that I know how to post on here expect to hear from me more often.

Bejan

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