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Transportation notes
Feb. 8th, 2013 01:18 pmThis university is home to the Texas Transportation Institute. I occasionally run into a graduate student who is housed there, because he is also a bicyclist. But whenever he's asked about the TTI, he's emphatic about the point that his job is to study cars and the things they do. This is typical of Texas, I find. Top-of-the-line, sophisticated research into driving. Not so much when it comes to other transit modes.
Anyway, the TTI just released a large study that's getting a fair amount of popular press, which incorporates a new index called the Planning Time Index - a measure of how much additional time one must budget if one *needs* to arrive at a certain location by a certain time. While it's good to see "reliability" factor in to driving trip plans, I sure wonder how PTI's scale for trips by foot, bicycle, or public transit.
I suspect the public transit option is pretty terrible in comparison, though that would depend on the city and country at hand. Not too long ago, my dad was telling me that most public transit trips take between 2 and 5 times as long as driving does, as a starting metric (though this may be outdated info). Just knowing this is useful for assessing (1) how long to expect transit to take, and (2) what constitutes a "good" transit network. My bus trips in Minneapolis tended to be closer to the 5x mark than the 2x mark, for instance. I also noticed that the trip from my parents' house to the airport was almost under that 2x mark.
Anyway, the TTI just released a large study that's getting a fair amount of popular press, which incorporates a new index called the Planning Time Index - a measure of how much additional time one must budget if one *needs* to arrive at a certain location by a certain time. While it's good to see "reliability" factor in to driving trip plans, I sure wonder how PTI's scale for trips by foot, bicycle, or public transit.
I suspect the public transit option is pretty terrible in comparison, though that would depend on the city and country at hand. Not too long ago, my dad was telling me that most public transit trips take between 2 and 5 times as long as driving does, as a starting metric (though this may be outdated info). Just knowing this is useful for assessing (1) how long to expect transit to take, and (2) what constitutes a "good" transit network. My bus trips in Minneapolis tended to be closer to the 5x mark than the 2x mark, for instance. I also noticed that the trip from my parents' house to the airport was almost under that 2x mark.
