APTA’s annual Multimodal Operations Planning Workshop will be held here in Seattle next August from the 15th through 17th, a three-day event consisting of workshop sessions, panels, and technical tours. Unlike larger conferences like Rail~Volution, the Multimodal Workshop is much more technically-oriented and typically draws a clientele of transit planners and schedulers from around the country.
While geared more toward professionals in the transit world, the workshop is open to the general public, albeit at a higher price for non-APTA members. Topics include service scheduling, route design and structuring, facilities planning and more. Attendees will be treated to a luncheon on the workshop’s first day with guest speaker Jarrett Walker, author of Human Transit. There will also be four technical tours of various systems in the region, including a joint operations tour in the DSTT.
Registration information can be found here. Though there’s no set cap on how many can attend, there is limited capacity at the Red Lion, where the workshop is being held. If you plan on attending, please RSVP in the comments below and register as soon as possible so that APTA and Sound Transit, the host agency, can get a sense of how many will need to be accommodated. A pre-workshop technical tour will also be held in Portland the weekend before, which does not require workshop registration but does have space limitations so RSVP for that ASAP if you’re interested.
$1025?? Are you f***ing kidding me?
+1. If it were $300 or less, I’d be there.
I’d go up to about $400, but a grand is just silly.
Usually the person’s employer (a transit agency or consultant) pays for this kind of stuff.
Yeah, this is a business-level price. Surprised they would even bother opening it to the public.
You are getting a graduate level seminar in transit for that price, with a lot of real world knowledge and technical detail. Many of the topics are covered in the usual public transit textbooks but this gives you real world experience. Considering the number of speakers and where they are flying them out from the cost is not that unreasonable.
For a grand I expect to find out who really shot JFK.
+2, Bruce
That was about my reaction too. I don’t have a grand to spare for this.
That does give me an idea. Perhaps STB could organize its own informal workshop. A day where we could talk about the upcoming route-reorganization issues in speaker+discussion format, and redesign a neighborhood’s routes collaboratively. The discussion part would just require knowledgeable speakers putting together a talk equivalent to a few blog articles.
The exercise part would require choosing a district(s) to focus on, getting the segment-ridership data and service-hour data from Metro/ST/city, and the various future-network plans they’ve produced, and explaining how to interpret the data and the requirements for a solution. (To make it more fun, consider a no-additional-hours scenario and a two-additional-all-day-routes scenario.) The result would be a well-considered group suggestion rather than the off-the-tops-of-our-heads suggestions in the blog comments, and they may actually prompt the Metro/ST planners to consider them or at least give us a response on how feasable they would be.
A pre-workshop technical tour to Portland seems interesting and free. I am not sure if I can go, but is there anyone interested in forming a convoy to Portland (on Amtrak, of course)?
While I can’t go, why not take the bus? (only true transit nerds should follow the link) ;)
Haha, that’s a long way to go. It’s probably not gonna work on Sunday, plus I have to get there by 11am to join the tour…
I am not sure CAP still runs.
Ok, that’s just awesome.