During the interwar period, illegal shared ride sedans (known as ‘wildcat sedans’) appealed to a ... more During the interwar period, illegal shared ride sedans (known as ‘wildcat sedans’) appealed to a significant fraction of travellers between Los Angeles and San Francisco, defying California’s ethos of regulated rail and bus monopolies. Several historians documented the urban jitney phenomenon, but none examined California’s wildcat sedans. This paper attempts to fill that void. It examines how private automobiles posed a challenge to corporate interests in the intercity public transportation, investigating the structure and economics of the wildcatters, how wildcatters exploited the legal ambiguities of private motor vehicles to challenge those corporations, and the public welfare consequences of this defiance of the regulatory state.
Between 1980 and 2005, 16 U.S. metropolitan areas opened rail transit systems. Most of the rail l... more Between 1980 and 2005, 16 U.S. metropolitan areas opened rail transit systems. Most of the rail lines were applications of light rail concepts and technology. These metropolitan areas joined 10 others whose systems predate the recent rail transit renaissance. Some of these rail transit metropolises have enjoyed increased riding habit and/or service productivity in recent years, while others have experienced stagnant or declining riding habit and/or service productivity. The term riding habit refers to ridership (passenger miles) per capita while service productivity refers to load factor (passenger miles per vehicle mile). The purpose of this paper is to explain why some metropolitan areas with rail transit have experienced performance success and others have not. A specific focus of the paper is to better understand the role that systems planning decisions have played in rail transit success or failure. This paper examines the transit development history of 10 mid-sized U.S. metropolitan areas that adopted rail transit during the past 30 years: Atlanta, Georgia; Dallas–Fort Worth, Texas; Denver, Colorado; Miami, Florida; Minneapolis–St. Paul, Minnesota; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Portland, Oregon; Sacramento, California; Salt Lake City, Utah; and San Diego, California. Planners in these metropolitan areas have followed different conceptualizations for how rail investments serve larger transit development goals. Such conceptualization is called systems planning, and the authors demonstrate that it matters in subsequent transit performance. All 10 metropolitan areas have become increasingly decentralized over the past century in employment as well as residential location, and urban decentralization has posed significant challenges for transit planners. Some planners have by design or inadvertently used rail transit investments to increase the usefulness of the overall transit network in reaching decentralized destinations. Others have used rail transit to provide superior service to the regional central business district (CBD) in competition with bus services also serving the CBD. The authors hypothesize that the decision to either decentralize service to reach dispersed destinations or focus service on the CBD accounts for the variation in transit system performance across the 10 metropolitan areas.
Transportation Research Board 92nd Annual MeetingTransportation Research Board, 2013
ABSTRACT This study analyses the structure of transit demand in Atlanta's transit system ... more ABSTRACT This study analyses the structure of transit demand in Atlanta's transit system to understand why different elements of the network appeal to bus and rail riders. By estimating direct demand models of work trip use between pairs of traffic analysis zones, the authors find that self-identified bus riders come from poorer areas having fewer autos per household and seek to reach jobs scattered throughout the metropolitan area. Their demand is highly elastic with respect to travel time. They care not about the presence of transit-oriented development (TOD) attributes at either origins or destinations. Self-identified rail riders primarily access transit by automobile and value fast service to within convenient walking distance of employment, such as in the central business district (CBD) and some but not all TODs. The results suggest that an agency could increase ridership by both groups using a core network of higher speed lines that provide access to decentralised employment centres.
iForeword The Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) administers block grants to public tran... more iForeword The Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) administers block grants to public transportation agencies throughout the state for the purpose of providing alternatives to private passenger transportation for use by the general public. It also administers the delivery to Florida public transportation agencies of federal funds pursuant to Section 5307 of the Mass Transit Act and intended for the same purposes as the state block grant funds. In recent years as previously rural counties attained urban status, agencies that had been created to provide specialized transportation for disadvantaged persons became eligible to receive block grants and Section 5307 funds in exchange for providing general public transportation services in addition to their original missions. The Florida Department of Transportation commissioned this study to learn the various ways in which five of the new Section 5307 transit agencies have been providing public transportation services for the genera...
Park plant the automobile transformed American intercity travel habits. My dissertation addresses... more Park plant the automobile transformed American intercity travel habits. My dissertation addresses how railroad management adapted its passenger service strategy in response to this challenge. Evaluating management actions in relation to consumer preferences, I sought to determine whether they were an economically rational response to the new auto competition. I approached this objective by using the historical method and econometrics with primary sources to evaluate explanations scholars have proposed for passenger train decline. The economist George H. Hilton, among others, explained the decline simply as consumer preference for a superior technology [5]. Bradford Snell's well-known allegation that urban electric traction service disappeared because of anti-market manipulations by a GM-controlled holding company has its intercity analogue where the holding company was the Greyhound Corporation [12]. John McKay and Paul Barrett have placed part of the blame for transit decline ...
Florida’s Transportation Concurrency Mandate Florida’s landmark 1985 Growth Management Act includ... more Florida’s Transportation Concurrency Mandate Florida’s landmark 1985 Growth Management Act included a “concurrency” provision, which mandated that development is not to proceed unless infrastructure capacity and specific urban services are in place to service new development. Transportation facilities were identified as one of the facility types required to be concurrent prior to the issuance of development orders. In practice this has meant that in the absence of capacity on existing or planned roads, new development was not to be permitted by local jurisdictions. Research into the design and implementation of Florida’s transportation concurrency mandate has revealed that this policy for managing growth has suffered from implementation problems since its inception. These flaws range from big, theoretical issues, like a failure to recognize the fundamental relationship between supply and demand in travel behavior, to smaller issues of implementation, such as a failure to adequately ...
This document reports on the first year progress of a multi-year study intended to control for so... more This document reports on the first year progress of a multi-year study intended to control for socio-economic, land-use, and transit level of service variables in analyzing whether markets exist for transit in suburban environments. Task 1 summarizes transit trends in Florida. Task 1b is a trial effort based on Sacramento data to bridge gaps between the urban structure-oriented and the transit level-of-service-oriented studies by controlling both sets of variables. Task 2 involves developing a program to abstract variables from the US Census Public Use Micro Sample for a later analysis of policy variables on transit use. Task 3 caries out a demonstration of the feasibility of merging of assessor land use files with US Census Summary Tape files for Orange County at the census tract level of detail.
On behalf of Professor Jeffrey Brown and myself, I am pleased to submit to you the final report, ... more On behalf of Professor Jeffrey Brown and myself, I am pleased to submit to you the final report, “Evaluation of Land Use and Transportation Strategies to Increase Suburban Transit Ridership in the Short Term. ” I think that you will find that we addressed all of your comments satisfactorily. We also took the opportunity to refine our statistical analysis, and we reference its results to an onboard survey conducted of Broward County Transit passengers. This additional work shows a more robust statistical analysis supporting the overall conclusion that reducing transit travel times between all pairs of major origins and destinations is the most fruitful path to increasing transit ridership. There are many ways in which public policy can encourage shorter transit times, including the promotion of TODs on both the origins and destinations of trips. Such TOD policies would have the result of shortening walking time, which is an important component of the overall time spent in traveling f...
... rail rights of way to determine their suitability for modern tramways.29 In addition to Webbe... more ... rail rights of way to determine their suitability for modern tramways.29 In addition to Webber and Buel ... Hupp notes, In City Hall, as part of the Goldschmidt reform agenda, a new Planning Director, Ernie Bonner ... Thompson / TAMING THE NEIGHBORHOOD REVOLUTION 223 ...
overing three subjects, this paper sets forth conditions that led to the beginning of the light r... more overing three subjects, this paper sets forth conditions that led to the beginning of the light rail movement in North America. The first subject is a history of ideas and conditions that led to the National Conference on Light Rail held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in June 1975. The second and third subjects are summaries of the ideas and conditions that led to the adoption
In challenging the idea that highway investment leads to economic growth, it was hypothesized tha... more In challenging the idea that highway investment leads to economic growth, it was hypothesized that both highway investment and economic growth are related to a third variable: decentralization. To test this idea with 1980 and 1990 data from the county level in Florida, three working hypotheses were postulated: (a) economic growth is a function not of highway investment but of the population growth rate, (b) highway investment is a function of the population growth rate, and (c) traffic congestion growth is a function of initial traffic congestion, growth in road capacity, and population growth. Equations to test the three hypotheses were estimated with county-level data from Florida. Data included population, jobs, income, traffic, and road growth between 1980 and 1990. Overall, the results generally failed to support the idea that both income growth and highway growth are related to the variable decentralization. Income growth appears to be weakly related to suburbanization; growth...
During the interwar period, illegal shared ride sedans (known as ‘wildcat sedans’) appealed to a ... more During the interwar period, illegal shared ride sedans (known as ‘wildcat sedans’) appealed to a significant fraction of travellers between Los Angeles and San Francisco, defying California’s ethos of regulated rail and bus monopolies. Several historians documented the urban jitney phenomenon, but none examined California’s wildcat sedans. This paper attempts to fill that void. It examines how private automobiles posed a challenge to corporate interests in the intercity public transportation, investigating the structure and economics of the wildcatters, how wildcatters exploited the legal ambiguities of private motor vehicles to challenge those corporations, and the public welfare consequences of this defiance of the regulatory state.
Between 1980 and 2005, 16 U.S. metropolitan areas opened rail transit systems. Most of the rail l... more Between 1980 and 2005, 16 U.S. metropolitan areas opened rail transit systems. Most of the rail lines were applications of light rail concepts and technology. These metropolitan areas joined 10 others whose systems predate the recent rail transit renaissance. Some of these rail transit metropolises have enjoyed increased riding habit and/or service productivity in recent years, while others have experienced stagnant or declining riding habit and/or service productivity. The term riding habit refers to ridership (passenger miles) per capita while service productivity refers to load factor (passenger miles per vehicle mile). The purpose of this paper is to explain why some metropolitan areas with rail transit have experienced performance success and others have not. A specific focus of the paper is to better understand the role that systems planning decisions have played in rail transit success or failure. This paper examines the transit development history of 10 mid-sized U.S. metropolitan areas that adopted rail transit during the past 30 years: Atlanta, Georgia; Dallas–Fort Worth, Texas; Denver, Colorado; Miami, Florida; Minneapolis–St. Paul, Minnesota; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Portland, Oregon; Sacramento, California; Salt Lake City, Utah; and San Diego, California. Planners in these metropolitan areas have followed different conceptualizations for how rail investments serve larger transit development goals. Such conceptualization is called systems planning, and the authors demonstrate that it matters in subsequent transit performance. All 10 metropolitan areas have become increasingly decentralized over the past century in employment as well as residential location, and urban decentralization has posed significant challenges for transit planners. Some planners have by design or inadvertently used rail transit investments to increase the usefulness of the overall transit network in reaching decentralized destinations. Others have used rail transit to provide superior service to the regional central business district (CBD) in competition with bus services also serving the CBD. The authors hypothesize that the decision to either decentralize service to reach dispersed destinations or focus service on the CBD accounts for the variation in transit system performance across the 10 metropolitan areas.
Transportation Research Board 92nd Annual MeetingTransportation Research Board, 2013
ABSTRACT This study analyses the structure of transit demand in Atlanta's transit system ... more ABSTRACT This study analyses the structure of transit demand in Atlanta's transit system to understand why different elements of the network appeal to bus and rail riders. By estimating direct demand models of work trip use between pairs of traffic analysis zones, the authors find that self-identified bus riders come from poorer areas having fewer autos per household and seek to reach jobs scattered throughout the metropolitan area. Their demand is highly elastic with respect to travel time. They care not about the presence of transit-oriented development (TOD) attributes at either origins or destinations. Self-identified rail riders primarily access transit by automobile and value fast service to within convenient walking distance of employment, such as in the central business district (CBD) and some but not all TODs. The results suggest that an agency could increase ridership by both groups using a core network of higher speed lines that provide access to decentralised employment centres.
iForeword The Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) administers block grants to public tran... more iForeword The Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) administers block grants to public transportation agencies throughout the state for the purpose of providing alternatives to private passenger transportation for use by the general public. It also administers the delivery to Florida public transportation agencies of federal funds pursuant to Section 5307 of the Mass Transit Act and intended for the same purposes as the state block grant funds. In recent years as previously rural counties attained urban status, agencies that had been created to provide specialized transportation for disadvantaged persons became eligible to receive block grants and Section 5307 funds in exchange for providing general public transportation services in addition to their original missions. The Florida Department of Transportation commissioned this study to learn the various ways in which five of the new Section 5307 transit agencies have been providing public transportation services for the genera...
Park plant the automobile transformed American intercity travel habits. My dissertation addresses... more Park plant the automobile transformed American intercity travel habits. My dissertation addresses how railroad management adapted its passenger service strategy in response to this challenge. Evaluating management actions in relation to consumer preferences, I sought to determine whether they were an economically rational response to the new auto competition. I approached this objective by using the historical method and econometrics with primary sources to evaluate explanations scholars have proposed for passenger train decline. The economist George H. Hilton, among others, explained the decline simply as consumer preference for a superior technology [5]. Bradford Snell's well-known allegation that urban electric traction service disappeared because of anti-market manipulations by a GM-controlled holding company has its intercity analogue where the holding company was the Greyhound Corporation [12]. John McKay and Paul Barrett have placed part of the blame for transit decline ...
Florida’s Transportation Concurrency Mandate Florida’s landmark 1985 Growth Management Act includ... more Florida’s Transportation Concurrency Mandate Florida’s landmark 1985 Growth Management Act included a “concurrency” provision, which mandated that development is not to proceed unless infrastructure capacity and specific urban services are in place to service new development. Transportation facilities were identified as one of the facility types required to be concurrent prior to the issuance of development orders. In practice this has meant that in the absence of capacity on existing or planned roads, new development was not to be permitted by local jurisdictions. Research into the design and implementation of Florida’s transportation concurrency mandate has revealed that this policy for managing growth has suffered from implementation problems since its inception. These flaws range from big, theoretical issues, like a failure to recognize the fundamental relationship between supply and demand in travel behavior, to smaller issues of implementation, such as a failure to adequately ...
This document reports on the first year progress of a multi-year study intended to control for so... more This document reports on the first year progress of a multi-year study intended to control for socio-economic, land-use, and transit level of service variables in analyzing whether markets exist for transit in suburban environments. Task 1 summarizes transit trends in Florida. Task 1b is a trial effort based on Sacramento data to bridge gaps between the urban structure-oriented and the transit level-of-service-oriented studies by controlling both sets of variables. Task 2 involves developing a program to abstract variables from the US Census Public Use Micro Sample for a later analysis of policy variables on transit use. Task 3 caries out a demonstration of the feasibility of merging of assessor land use files with US Census Summary Tape files for Orange County at the census tract level of detail.
On behalf of Professor Jeffrey Brown and myself, I am pleased to submit to you the final report, ... more On behalf of Professor Jeffrey Brown and myself, I am pleased to submit to you the final report, “Evaluation of Land Use and Transportation Strategies to Increase Suburban Transit Ridership in the Short Term. ” I think that you will find that we addressed all of your comments satisfactorily. We also took the opportunity to refine our statistical analysis, and we reference its results to an onboard survey conducted of Broward County Transit passengers. This additional work shows a more robust statistical analysis supporting the overall conclusion that reducing transit travel times between all pairs of major origins and destinations is the most fruitful path to increasing transit ridership. There are many ways in which public policy can encourage shorter transit times, including the promotion of TODs on both the origins and destinations of trips. Such TOD policies would have the result of shortening walking time, which is an important component of the overall time spent in traveling f...
... rail rights of way to determine their suitability for modern tramways.29 In addition to Webbe... more ... rail rights of way to determine their suitability for modern tramways.29 In addition to Webber and Buel ... Hupp notes, In City Hall, as part of the Goldschmidt reform agenda, a new Planning Director, Ernie Bonner ... Thompson / TAMING THE NEIGHBORHOOD REVOLUTION 223 ...
overing three subjects, this paper sets forth conditions that led to the beginning of the light r... more overing three subjects, this paper sets forth conditions that led to the beginning of the light rail movement in North America. The first subject is a history of ideas and conditions that led to the National Conference on Light Rail held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in June 1975. The second and third subjects are summaries of the ideas and conditions that led to the adoption
In challenging the idea that highway investment leads to economic growth, it was hypothesized tha... more In challenging the idea that highway investment leads to economic growth, it was hypothesized that both highway investment and economic growth are related to a third variable: decentralization. To test this idea with 1980 and 1990 data from the county level in Florida, three working hypotheses were postulated: (a) economic growth is a function not of highway investment but of the population growth rate, (b) highway investment is a function of the population growth rate, and (c) traffic congestion growth is a function of initial traffic congestion, growth in road capacity, and population growth. Equations to test the three hypotheses were estimated with county-level data from Florida. Data included population, jobs, income, traffic, and road growth between 1980 and 1990. Overall, the results generally failed to support the idea that both income growth and highway growth are related to the variable decentralization. Income growth appears to be weakly related to suburbanization; growth...
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