Mobility and Equity for New York's Transit-Starved Neighborhoods: The Case for Full-Featured Bus Rapid Transit

New York City's public transportation system moves millions of people every day. But an increasing number who live in outer borough neighborhoods are stuck with unreliable transit options and long travel times tracked in hours, not minutes.It does not have to be this way.Developed by the Pratt Center for Community Development and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, this report highlights the limitations of New York City's current public transit system, the adverse effects those limitations have on our economy and quality of life, and the role Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) can play in remedying these transit inequities.BRT has transformed cities across the world from Mexico City to Barcelona to Cleveland. At a fraction of the cost to build just a mile of subway rail, BRT gives riders a reliable way to get where they need to go.BRT is effective. It is innovative. And it could be the solution for New York's transit-starved neighborhoods

Shared-Use Bus Priority Lanes On City Streets: Case Studies in Design and Management, MTI Report 11-10

This report examines the policies and strategies governing the design and, especially, operations of bus lanes in major congested urban centers. It focuses on bus lanes that operate in mixed traffic conditions; the study does not examine practices concerning bus priority lanes on urban highways or freeways. Four key questions addressed in the paper are: How do the many public agencies within any city region that share authority over different aspects of the bus lanes coordinate their work in designing, operating, and enforcing the lanes? What is the physical design of the lanes? What is the scope of the priority use granted to buses? When is bus priority in effect, and what other users may share the lanes during these times? How are the lanes enforced? To answer these questions, the study developed detailed cases on the bus lane development and management strategies in seven cities that currently have shared-use bus priority lanes: Los Angeles, London, New York City, Paris, San Francisco, Seoul, and Sydney. Through the case studies, the paper examines the range of practices in use, thus providing planners and decision makers with an awareness of the wide variety of design and operational options available to them. In addition, the report highlights innovative practices that contribute to bus lanes’ success, where the research findings make this possible, such as mechanisms for integrating or jointly managing bus lane planning and operations across agencies

Performance Measures to Assess Resiliency and Efficiency of Transit Systems

Transit agencies are interested in assessing the short-, mid-, and long-term performance of infrastructure with the objective of enhancing resiliency and efficiency. This report addresses three distinct aspects of New Jersey’s Transit System: 1) resiliency of bridge infrastructure, 2) resiliency of public transit systems, and 3) efficiency of transit systems with an emphasis on paratransit service. This project proposed a conceptual framework to assess the performance and resiliency for bridge structures in a transit network before and after disasters utilizing structural health monitoring (SHM), finite element (FE) modeling and remote sensing using Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR). The public transit systems in NY/NJ were analyzed based on their vulnerability, resiliency, and efficiency in recovery following a major natural disaster

The Minimum Circuity Frontier and the Journey to Work

In an urban context people travel between places of residence and work destinations via transportation networks. Transportation studies that involve measurements of distances between residence and work locations tend to use Euclidean distances rather than Network distances. This is due to the historic difficulty in calculating network distances and based on assumptions that differences between Euclidean distance and network distance tend to be constant. This assumption is true only when variation in the network is minor and when self-selection is not present. In this paper we use circuity, the ratio of network to Euclidean distance, as a tool to better understand the choice of residential location relative to work. This is done using two methods of defining origins and destinations in the Twin Cities metropolitan region. The first method of selection is based on actual choice of residence and work locations. The second is based on a randomly selected dataset of origins and destinations in the same region. The findings of the study show circuity measured through randomly selected origins and destinations differ from circuity measured from actual origins and destinations. Workers tend to reside in areas where the circuity is lower, applying intelligence to their location decisions. We posit this because locators wish to achieve the largest residential lot at the shortest commute time. This finding reveals an important issue related to resident choice and location theory and how resident workers tend to locate in an urban context.Network structure, travel behavior, transport geography, commuting, circuity

Improving Livability Using Green and Active Modes: A Traffic Stress Level Analysis of Transit, Bicycle, and Pedestrian Access and Mobility

Understanding the relative attractiveness of alternatives to driving is vitally important toward lowering driving rates and, by extension, vehicle miles traveled (VMT), traffic congestion, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, etc. The relative effectiveness of automobile alternatives (i.e., buses, bicycling, and walking) depends on how well streets are designed to work for these respective modes in terms of safety, comfort and cost, which can sometimes pit their relative effectiveness against each other. In this report, the level of traffic stress (LTS) criteria previously developed by two of the authors was used to determine how the streets functioned for these auto alternative modes. The quality and extent of the transit service area was measured using a total travel time metric over the LTS network. The model developed in this study was applied to two transit routes in Oakland, California, and Denver, Colorado

Improving Bus Service in New York

New York City’s transportation system is in a state of disarray. City street are clogged with taxi’s and for-hire vehicles, subway platforms are packed with straphangers waiting for delayed trains and buses barely travel faster than pedestrians. The bureaucracy of City and State government in the region causes piecemeal improvements which do not keep up with the state of disrepair. Bus service is particularly poor, moving at rates incomparable with the rest of the country. New York has recently made successful efforts at improving bus speeds, but only so much can be done amidst a city of gridlock. Bus systems around the world faced similar challenges and successfully implemented improvements. A toolbox of near-immediate and long-term options are at New York’s disposal dealing directly with bus service as well indirect causes of poor bus service. The failing subway system has prompted public discussion concerning bus service. A significant cause of poor service in New York is congestion. A number of measures are capable of improving congestion and consequently, bus service. Due to the city’s limited capacity at implementing short-term solutions, the most highly problematic routes should receive priority. Routes with slow speeds, high rates of bunching and high ridership are concentrated in Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn which also cater to the most subway riders. These areas would also benefit the greatest from congestion mitigation measures

Urban Mosaic: Visual Exploration of Streetscapes Using Large-Scale Image Data

Urban planning is increasingly data driven, yet the challenge of designing with data at a city scale and remaining sensitive to the impact at a human scale is as important today as it was for Jane Jacobs. We address this challenge with Urban Mosaic,a tool for exploring the urban fabric through a spatially and temporally dense data set of 7.7 million street-level images from New York City, captured over the period of a year. Working in collaboration with professional practitioners, we use Urban Mosaic to investigate questions of accessibility and mobility, and preservation and retrofitting. In doing so, we demonstrate how tools such as this might provide a bridge between the city and the street, by supporting activities such as visual comparison of geographically distant neighborhoods,and temporal analysis of unfolding urban development.Comment: Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nrhk7lb3GU