Next month, noted transit planning consultant Jarrett Walker is hosting another session of his firm’s Transit Network Design course in Portland:
“Transit Network Design: an Interactive Short Course” is designed to give anyone a grasp of how network design works, so that they can form more confident and resilient opinions about transit proposals.
The course is ideal for people who interact with transit planning in their work but don’t necessarily do it themselves — including land use planners, urban designers, developers, traffic engineers, sustainability advocates, transit employees of all kinds, and people who work on transportation or urban policy generally. Advocates who want to be more realistic and effective will also find the course valuable, especially as a companion to my book Human Transit.
Jarrett’s firm consulted on Seattle’s previous Transit Master Plan, which first outlined the goal of a citywide frequent-service Urban Village Transit Network; on Spokane’s 1998 transit network redesign, which dramatically rethought a failing streetcar-era radial network; and Bellevue’s recently-adopted Transit Master Plan, which promises to do similarly for that city. If you regularly ride transit in Washington, you’ve almost certainly benefited, directly or indirectly, from the clarity of thought Jarrett’s work has injected into contemporary service planning, and if you want to go from reading about this stuff to really understanding it, taking this class is the fastest way.
This course doesn’t contain anything you can’t learn on your own (quite easily), but I realize a lot of people don’t know where to look or how to learn stuff like this, so I suppose it’s valuable.
Oh, you took the class?
Bruce, I suspect there’s more than one reader of this blog who does know the ins and outs of transit and network planning – without needing to attend such a class. That said, other than the Introduction to Transit Operations Planning (ITOPS) class, there’s not much like this out there.
I think Bruce’s comment was not meant to disparage Nathaniel’s knowledge of transit, but rather to say “dont knock it till you try it”.
I think the value of a class is learning from the interaction among its participants and the instructor. You can’t get that just from reading books.
Mmm. I’ve interacted with Jarrett. Frankly, I wouldn’t hire him.
In a perfect world, wouldn’t there be room for network design exercises in middle school geography curricula?
It’s interdisciplinary: You learn design from making the maps, get an arithmetic workout calculating travel times, and can practice rhetoric / persuasive writing in mock public hearings / letters to the editor, or maybe nowadays, blog post comments.
It’s good group work, with organic lists of pros / cons for any layout. People can write individual reports on what they learned from the exercise, or write about the process of a real-life transit system.
The most I had was figuring out routes on the highways of Ohio on a geography bee written exam and sitting with the planning / zoning committee on “shadow a town official” day in 6th grade. Less fun than toy cities.
STB should create a scholarship to this, paying for any elected official that thinks they know how to plan a system.
Or, if you can’t afford to go, just read this:
http://thinkmetric.com/pubs/itt/Maxwell1999.pdf
“Applicability of the Integraler Taktfahrplan
Strategy to North America”
The importance of a fully integrated public transportation system,
where passengers can easily transfer between different routes and
modes, cannot be overstated. Just such an integrated public transportation
system is being implemented in Switzerland, Austria,
the Netherlands, and parts of Germany. This fixed-interval, timedtransfer,
multihub system, using intercity rail as the backbone, can
integrate all modes, including high-speed trains, maglev, local and
regional trains, buses, urban transit, ferries, and in Switzerland cable
ways and funiculars. In German it is called Integraler Taktfahrplan
(ITF) from Integraler: integrated; Takt: heartbeat, musical beat, or
the steady pulse of a fixed-interval schedule; and Fahrplan: timetable
or schedule, from fahren: to ride—hence, “ride plan.”
In the United States and Canada, the intercity surface public transportation
system, especially the passenger rail system, has become
fragmented. As an insidious consequence, a sense of the whole has
been lost.
Well, Nathanael, I hope you gave Jarrett your feedback, rather than just trolling on posts about his work.