Dear Friends: Here in London, Ontario they are in the middle of spending about 1/2 of a BILLION dollars on a new 24 km rapid transit system.
While the effort is laudable it makes no sense....... like a lot of government projects.
The speed is OK and the convienience on the route is fine but while these B.R.T.s run every five minutes or so the connecting local busses still come by every twenty minutes to a half hour which makes the fast trains sort of irrelevant in the grand scheme of things!
What I'm trying to say is that while the B.R.T. busses are a bit faster (?) than a regular bus, it is the local runs thru the suburbs that need to have a lot more frequency so that you're not left standing out in the rain or snow while your neighbour in a car waves to you as they drive by!!!!! (It might not be a bad idea to have bus bays and decent shelters at every stop as well as a type of system that takes you right from your house to the nearest bus stop with transit vans...........much like the 'Uber' system we have now!)
I remember being in Glasgow a few years back where EVERYBODY takes the bus and as you're climbing into one bus you can see the next one coming down the road in the distance.
This is what makes buses popular folks......, not getting there one of two minutes faster. (Here's a good example of how misguided these project can be!)
While the effort is laudable it makes no sense....... like a lot of government projects.
The speed is OK and the convienience on the route is fine but while these B.R.T.s run every five minutes or so the connecting local busses still come by every twenty minutes to a half hour which makes the fast trains sort of irrelevant in the grand scheme of things!
What I'm trying to say is that while the B.R.T. busses are a bit faster (?) than a regular bus, it is the local runs thru the suburbs that need to have a lot more frequency so that you're not left standing out in the rain or snow while your neighbour in a car waves to you as they drive by!!!!! (It might not be a bad idea to have bus bays and decent shelters at every stop as well as a type of system that takes you right from your house to the nearest bus stop with transit vans...........much like the 'Uber' system we have now!)
I remember being in Glasgow a few years back where EVERYBODY takes the bus and as you're climbing into one bus you can see the next one coming down the road in the distance.
This is what makes buses popular folks......, not getting there one of two minutes faster. (Here's a good example of how misguided these project can be!)
Folks, remember what a lot of urban planners seem to forget.............. it's frequency and convenience, not speed, that makes public transit popular!The efficiency of Japan's bullet trains are a modern marvel, and now JR East, the East Japan Railway Company, wants to increase it even further. The company began a two-year construction project that will get passengers from Ueno to Omiya an entire one minute faster (at most).It seems like a lot of investment for a minimal gain, but as Nikkei makes clear, being able to send trains between the stations at 130 km per hour, as opposed to the current limit of 110 km per hour, is important. It's currently around a 30-minute trip between the two. "Even reducing the time by a minute is a big step towards increasing passenger numbers," a representative told Nikkei.
The way I see it anyway!
*********************
No comments:
Post a Comment