Here's another bit of transit good news in the Midwest. The share of workers in downtown Columbus using transit to to comment rose from 5% to somewhere between 10-14% in only about a year. Columbus underground has the story. This ridership surge is a result of the C-Pass program, which provides a free bus pass to downtown workers. I've argued for a while that small cities should have fareless transit. Their farebox recovery is generally very small. Overall ridership is low. And the system is mostly below capacity. What's more, the riders of … [Read more...]
Archives for August 2019
Indy’s Cost Effective Transit Improvement Plan Is a Model for Low Density Cities
My latest piece is online at CityLab. It's a look at the transit improvement plans in Indianapolis as the city's first Bus Rapid Transit line on September 1st. Indy's system is a model for how lower density cities with auto-centric cultures can start making major improvements in their transit offerings in a capital efficient way. (Transport guru Yonah Freemark likewise holds the Indy system in high regard, writing in Streetsblog back in 2017 that it is going to be "like launching a brand new transit system."). Indy is upgrading its system in … [Read more...]
A Blast from the Past in Charlotte and Columbus
I saw a couple of recent reposts containing very interesting material from several decades ago in Charlotte and Columbus. The first is a 25 minute TV special from the 1960s looking at a proposal to issue bonds to fund urban renewal in downtown Charlotte. A few things struck me about this. The first is that despite the video being labeled "Uptown Do or Die" by the local organization that posted it, Charlotte's central business district is consistently referred to in the video as "downtown" not "uptown" as people do today. It's interesting to … [Read more...]