Affordable transit service can be a major asset to low-wage workers, but characteristics of their jobs—such as where and when they work—may keep them from using those services. New research in Toronto focuses more attention on the work end of the trips in determining how well transit can meet workers’ needs and finding ways to increase transit effectiveness and ridership.
Multimodal
AllTransit: Transit connectivity, accessibility, and frequency
The Center for Neighborhood Technology and TransitCenter has released its AllTransit tool that assists in analysis, planning, and visualization of transit systems. AllTransit stands out through its ability to analyze a variety of metrics quickly, producing outputs in the form of GIS-based maps, charts, and tables that can be employed to educate policy makers, planners, agencies, advocates, and the general public to make better informed choices about transit operations, service planning, and infrastructure investments.
AllTransit: Transit connectivity, accessibility, and frequency
The Center for Neighborhood Technology and TransitCenter has released its AllTransit tool that assists in analysis, planning, and visualization of transit systems. AllTransit stands out through its ability to analyze a variety of metrics quickly, producing outputs in the form of GIS-based maps, charts, and tables that can be employed to educate policy makers, planners, agencies, advocates, and the general public to make better informed choices about transit operations, service planning, and infrastructure investments.
Trip-making data, TDM, and connectivity in Northern Virginia (SSTI and Michael Baker International, 2016)
Commercially available GPS data offers valuable new insight about trip origins, destinations, and routes, including short trips that travel demand models often cannot capture. Using this data, SSTI worked with Michael Baker International, the Virginia DOT, and local stakeholders to identify opportunities for managing travel demand and improving connectivity throughout Northern Virginia. This final report describes the full data set and 17 selected case studies, along with recommended projects and policies, estimated costs, and benefits for each.
Not just speed and land use: considering directness of travel
Improving access to destinations means raising travel speed or reducing travel distance. Because of siloing within government, transportation agencies have traditionally worried about speed while leaving distances to land use authorities. However, one aspect of distance that transportation agencies can affect without breaking any silos is directness or circuity of travel. A paper from the University of Minnesota examines circuity in transit trips.
Capturing value for transit improvements
A new transportation enhancement fund assessment on real estate developers in Cambridge, Massachusetts’ Kendall Square will help fund transit improvements in that area, including possible enhancements to the Red Line Kendall/MIT station. This type of strategy, known broadly as value capture, is not new, and has been used in other cities such as San Francisco, Portland, and Washington, DC. However, the proposals in Cambridge have potential to serve as a model, developing into a value capture policy and process that can aid the T with further improvements going forward.
Virginia adopts multimodal, competitive project scoring process
Last year Virginia enacted legislation to select state-supported transportation projects through a multimodal, competitive process. The law prescribed five areas to be considered in the scoring, along with project cost: congestion mitigation, economic development, accessibility, safety, environmental quality and land use. The relative weights of those elements, and details of how to assess project benefits in those categories, were left to the rulemaking process, which concluded June 17.
Beyond mobility—prioritizing accessibility in urban transportation
The San Francisco Transit Accessibility Map is a new online tool showing how much of the city is accessible by transit or walking within a selected travel time. Although the map is useful as is, it also presents an enormous opportunity to develop a richly layered analysis that could be used to understand accessibility more broadly by adding data on non-work as well as work destinations. It could also highlight the need to improve accessibility for underserved areas.
Regional accessibility metric offers powerful approach to transportation system planning
Researchers at the University of Minnesota developed a measure of multimodal accessibility for the Minneapolis-St. Paul region, which they hope can be implemented in metropolitan areas around the nation as an alternative to commonly-used congestion metrics for prioritizing transportation projects and planning system improvements. For decades, transportation system performance has been measured in terms of traffic congestion and delay, both at the project scale and the regional scale. Developers of the new accessibility measure flip the equation by asking what the value of accessibility is, rather than what the costs of congestion are.
New accessibility tools available from Walk Score
For agencies that want to address the land use-transportation connection, Walk Score now provides a new form of accessibility measure, as well as data to help measure trends over time. The firm is offering a way to measure the depth of choices of destinations such as groceries or parks, in a platform called ChoiceMaps.