Milwaukee county executive race and transit

See "ON THE ISSUES: County exec race/transit," from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and also check out the Milwaukee Transit Riders Union.

WMATA Riders Advisory Committee meets tonight

From "Metro committee seeks public input," in today's Examiner:

Passengers wanting to comment on the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority’s rail system can speak out tonight.

Metro’s Riders’ Advisory Council will hold a public workshop at 7:30 p.m. inside the transit agency’s headquarters at 600 5th St. NW.

“Anytime we can get the public involved is a good thing,” riders’ committee chairman Michael Snyder said. “We are hoping to hear from different people who are excited about different issues.” Snyder said the committee will also take suggestions about which issues and projects it should push the system’s board of directors to address.

DC Circulator Bus Extension in Georgetown to Launch Monday

From Erik Linden, DDOT:

1. DC Circulator Bus Extension in Georgetown to Launch Monday
2. Smithsonian/National Gallery of Art Route Resumes Daily Schedule on March 26

As previously announced, the DC Circulator bus will extend its East/West route to take on the Georgetown Metro Connection "Blue Bus" Foggy Bottom line beginning Monday, March 26, 2007.

The Georgetown Metro Connection, fondly referred to as the "Blue Bus," was launched five years ago by the Georgetown Business Improvement District (BID), to link Georgetown to the three closest Metro stations - Foggy Bottom, Dupont Circle and Rosslyn. It was a precursor to the DC Circulator bus, demonstrating the high demand for efficient neighborhood-based surface transportation.

In an effort to provide the best and most efficient means of bus transportation in and around Georgetown , the District Department of Transportation - in partnership with the Georgetown BID - will conduct a six month trial to extend the Circulator's route.

The demonstration project will run through September 30, 2007 and if deemed successful will become an ongoing route. The Georgetown BID will continue to run its Blue Bus on the long-established Roslyn to Dupont Circle route.

Also, please note that the Circulator's Smithsonian/National Gallery of Art Route will resume running seven days a week on Monday March 26 as part of its seasonal change. The Smithsonian/National Gallery of Art Loop will run from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily.

For more information and for new route details please visit the DC Circulator website.

DC Circulator route map, Effective 3/26/2007

Think different...about mobility

(Reprinted from Rebuilding Place in the Urban Space, 12/2005)


Schwinn Women’s Cruiser 26" Bike for sale at $99.99 on the Target website. Target employees get a 10% discount.

When society is so focused on the car, it's hard to explore options in a focused and more broad-minded fashion. Take mobility. I get around the city of Washington (where I work and live) pretty much by bike.

Now some people say, "oh that saves you money." But it really doesn't. DC roads are not kind to bikes, neither are thieves. And I am not mechanically gifted so I pretty much pay for repairs and tuneups. So it costs about the same.

But what that doesn't take into account is the time I save. Rather than waiting for a bus or subway, for the most part I can ride where I need to go, when I want to. I figure that bike transportation saves me a minimum of 30 minutes/day (granted I waste that time blogging...).

Yesterday's Post, in "For the Carless, Life Is a Wait: Local Bus Systems Can Be Slow, but They Get There" recounts the story of Connie Wells in Fredericksburg, who takes a bus to work. She leaves up to three hours before she is supposed to be at work, to ensure she's on time. Unlike most people Ms. Wells actually lives pretty close to her job--it's three miles away.

From the article:

Connie Wells is waiting for the 1:10 p.m. bus outside her Fredericksburg apartment complex. Her cashier shift at Target doesn't start for nearly three hours, and she's only going three miles. But the next bus, in two hours, will get her there too late. So Wells is waiting, early -- very early -- to make it to a job she desperately needs.

Eventually, Bus No. 2 pulls up, a beige, boxy 20-seater on the regional system called "the Fred," which serves suburban cul-de-sacs, rural roads and the touristy little city of Fredericksburg. Wells beams at everyone in their clean, green vinyl seats as she walks down the aisle. And for the most part, they beam back, because that is the unspoken rule of the Fred: No complaining.
Image from Fredericksburg Public Transportation Evolution.

"I have learned a lot of patience riding the Fred," said Wells, 41, who sometimes gets to work nearly two hours early, where she waits in the break room talking with co-workers. The last bus leaves at 7 p.m., so if her shift runs past that, she'll take a taxi home, which costs $6.25 -- 75 cents shy of an hour's worth of smiling and taking money at a Target register.
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While I imagine that the roads from home to work don't offer convenient bike lanes or sidewalks, she could walk to work in one hour (saving two hours of her time there, and I don't know how much time coming back), or she could bike to work in no longer than 20 minutes--saving more than 2.5 hours of time getting to work, plus the time returning.

Transportation and mobility isn't just about bus, subway, or car--even in Fredericksburg.

Although, it's very important that businesses-office buildings offer quality bike parking as well as shower and locker facilities. Certainly shopping centers could offer this to employees, and it's another argument for requiring transportation demand management plans for commercial projects.

Note: it appears from the The Fred website, as well as the student paper referenced above, that the Fredericksburg area actually does pretty well from a transit perspective, offering more options than comparably sized regions across the country.

We need a transit users conference, now!

Cross-posted from Rebuilding Place in the Urban Space.

For more than a year, I've been suggesting that regional transit advocates need to have an annual conference, and lay out an "unconstrained" transit agenda, and then have the agenda "down" so that it can be pushed at any and every opportunity.

E.g. the Bethesda-New Carrollton Purple Line initiative is somewhat disconnected from the Cross-Wilson Bridge initiative from Branch Avenue to Alexandria. Wouldn't it make sense for these two initiatives to use the same technology?

A few weeks ago, I wrote about a transit users conference in Toronto, which brought about the power of "open source"--read civic engagement and deliberative democracy--to Toronto transit. See "Toronto "Transit Camp" engages citizens-users to improve the transit system."

DC1974 sends us a link to an article in SFist, "I wish," about ideas for upgrading and extending the Muni website and information services.

This reminds of the classic paper (later expanded into a book) by Eric Raymond, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" about the difference between traditional and open source methods for creating computer software. This paper predates by many years the idea of Web 2.0 and community-software applications (such as Flickr, Myspace, Youtube), and user-generated content platforms.

The thing is, this is a paper about top-down vs. bottom-up initiatives generally. When I first read it, I was struck by the similarities about how his points on software development relate to civic engagement and democracy.

Another paper summarizes:

In his paper, Raymond discusses the historical model for software development and compares it to building cathedrals, a slow and laborious effort with exacting methods carefully applied. Each brick and beam was carefully planned and the structure was erected with painstaking craftsmanship to meet the planned design and symmetry.

The bazaar, by contrast, was often created ad-hoc and in an evolutionary fashion. The bazaar started with a few street vendors and was later built up by additional vendors and merchants, each staking out a piece of the market place as their own and maintaining and adding to their stall until a full-blown Agora was in place.

Clearly each approach served its purpose well, but the cathedral method is rigid and static. It needs the contribution of each part exactly as designed in order to stand, and has difficulty adapting to any other shape or location. The open-source movement is all about flexibility and evolutionary development.

Raymond went on to review nineteen axioms of open-source development by discussing his experience developing "Fetchmail," a Linux application used to forward e-mail. These axioms are the basic tenets of the open-source community, and Raymond discussed them with detailed analysis and examples in the original paper.

Open source isn't just about "flexibility and evolutionary development." It is also about the power and creativity of the group. Open source links skill to a kind of organized, somewhat ordered, but messy democracy.

"Getting There" is the Baltimore Sun's transit column, and yesterday's column, "Awareness the ticket for better bus use," has a similar suggestion, but about ensuring connectivity between systems. (Note that Cableflame, now a co-writer on the companion Dr. Transit blog, points out that the new WMATA subway maps show the bus links to Dulles (5A) and BWI (B30) Airports.)

Michael Dresser suggests a regionwide system connectivity conference, although he is more focused on the Baltimore region, and the Maryland Mass Transit Administration.

From the article:

To its credit, the Transit Riders Action Coalition is prodding the General Assembly to adopt connectivity among adjoining local systems as a basic principle of state transportation policy. The advocacy group is pointing to such anomalies as a Carroll County system that connects with no other transit systems. Then there's that issue of base realignment, bringing thousands of new jobs to an Aberdeen area with woeful connections to Wilmington, Del., and Philadelphia.

The MTA could jump to the head of this parade. Here's a modest suggestion for you:

Convene a "Connectivity Summit" this summer, inviting every regional and local transit agency between Philadelphia and Northern Virginia along with transit activists, disability-rights groups and anyone who wants to participate. Hash out all the issues - from a common fare structure, to a universal "smart card" to a unified schedule database.

The long-neglected local transit systems are eager to join in and are looking forward to working with you."We're all hoping that with the new administration, things are going to get much better," said Carl Balser, chief of transportation planning for Howard Transit. "We have been fairly marginalized in the transit community for the last several years and we're hoping for a renaissance."

Note that MTA doesn't have a ride guide comparable to that created and continually improved by WMATA. I have argued that WMATA should license this system to MTA for the Baltimore region. Afterall, MTA is a funder of the WMATA system.

Anyway, I say we need to go beyond a strict conference on connectivity, and have a true regionwide transit users and advocacy conference, in part along the Toronto model, promoting the idea of the power of the group and "open source" transit and;

2. That this conference be co-sponsored by the Baltimore Sun and the Washington Post, which runs the Dr. Gridlock column, as well as the Baltimore and Washington editions of the Examiner, which each run the "Sprawl and Crawl" column by Steve Eldridge.

Note that along these lines, in January 2005, the Philadelphia City Paper did a great cover story on 33 ways to improve SEPTA. See "Let's Go." 33 ways to reinvent, rethink and recharge our beleaguered transit agency. Other cities around the world have cool public transportation systems. Why can't we?

Wouldn't it be cool for the Washington City Paper and the Baltimore City Paper to do this for each respective region, but run the articles the same week?

(Note that Mark Jenkins' piece in the Washington City Paper more than 10 years ago, proposing a Purple Line, was a significant contributor to my eventual involvement in these kinds of issues.)