Sublime

“Most people believe the alternative to cars is better transit—in truth, it’s better neighborhoods.” 71

My vision for transit is not a reinterpretation of the automobile highway – corridors for commuters – but a return to traditional transit systems: investments in financially productive places. A successful transit trip begins in a financially-productive place and ends in a financially-productive place, connecting the two in a way that is scaled to

Free Market Advocates (WINNERS): I count myself among this group and I love the concept of transportation spending decisions actually being made by supply and demand, not political patronage or an arbitrary standard.

Note that I didn’t say that cities should build bus networks that maximize access to jobs. I said they should maximize access to destinations. That’s because more than two-thirds of transit trips (and four-fifths of all trips) are noncommute trips.10 For this reason, there are usually more people who use the bus in a city than decisionmakers realiz

Consider desire lines in projects that emphasize usability. When possible, use creative methods to detect desire lines prior to finalizing design specifications.

Back in 1991, the Sierra Club’s John Holtzclaw studied travel habits in twenty-eight California communities of widely varying residential density. He found, as expected, an inverse relationship between urbanity and driving miles. But, perhaps not expected, he also found his data points distributed around a pretty sharp curve, with most of the gains