Welcome to Reconnections’ Friday Reads. If you have something you feel we should read or include in a future list, please email us at [email protected].
- • How useful are the “connectors” on the Tube Map? (CityMetric)
- • TransAtlantic transit podcast Pt 1 (Overhead Wire)
- • Washington DC’s other subway (Washington Post)
- • Moscow, a modern multi-modal city (Bloomberg)
- • Charging parking by the day cuts solo car commuting (Seattle Times)
- • Lyft charges its HQ employees for parking (Bloomberg)
- • New NYC Ferry service hits 1m milestone (PassengerShip)
- • England’s maritime heritage from the air – book review (IET)
WaPo link on Washington Subway is paywalled (!)
[I tested it several times (from Canada) and never saw a paywall, however it may be geographic, or you have hit your WaPo article limit. LBM]
[For what it’s worth, it works free of charge (but full of ads) for me. However, I am currently in France, so this observation may only confuse the issue vis-a-vis its visibility from the anglosphere. Malcolm]
The new NY ferries are, presumably a response to the logjam over increased/improved rail tunnels under the river?
It’s interesting to see that the priority for Seattle is just to reduce the number of people commuting by car on their own, whereas here it’s to reduce the number of people commuting by car full stop. They have got down to just over 30% of journeys to work being by a driver driving on his/her own. That’s considerably more than the total that drive to work in any form to central London.
No problem with Washington Post. Fascinating article and a couple of interesting comments below.
@ Quinlet – the blindingly obvious thing to say is that the USA is not London. Even though Seattle appears to have a passable transit network it is not on the scale of what we have. They have no heavy rail passenger services, 1 light rail line, a M******l, and are heavily reliant on buses. There are also ferry services to outlying islands / areas. To be honest I think they’re doing well to get down to that level of single occupancy in cars. I wasn’t shocked to read that companies pursuing a change to their workplace commuting patterns have to spend time educating *adults* on how to catch a bus. Of course we have the same situation in parts of the UK where commercial bus companies have videos and guides on their website to explain how to catch a bus. This situation will only get worse in the UK as bus services disappear and we have more generations of children who are ferried everywhere in the “taxi of mum and dad”.
Thankfully in London we are not quite in such a perilous state because there are incentives for families to use public transport and children get free travel. There is also a fairly long standing political culture in London that has advocated reducing car use and increasing public transport use. Someone put the 1981 London Labour Party Manifesto online the other day. It was amazing how much of what is in that document on transport matters remains relevant today. Plenty has changed for the better but some very familiar themes and aspirations remain – such as full devolution of main line commuter rail to democratic local control. I didn’t read the other sections but I suspect the 1981 views on housing issues will ring true today.
Apologies – there is some heavy rail transit in Seattle but it is essentially 1 commuter route from the south into Seattle and a much more limited service on a route north to Everett. We are talking about a handful of peak direction trains with barely any M-F off peak service. As for evenings and weekends forget it! There is also on Light Rail line and a Streetcar service. The former is a N-S line which serves the international airport and seems to run a frequent service. The latter is a central area service in two halves with a planned connecting line between them. Not having been to Seattle I’ve no clue how well used they are.
@WW – All Seattle local & commuter rail has been built in the last 20 years. Prior to that it was the largest US city without rail transit (other than a tourist streetcar line along the waterfront and up to King Street Station, which I believe no longer runs). So it was a bus only system, with some ferries across Puget Sound to Seattle. They then started rapid transit with a unique bus tunnel downtown, which was built to operate LRT, which it did, albeit with some engineering problems. It’s been two decades since I’ve been there, but it appears the rail network is popular.
Since the 1981 Labour GLC manifesto has been referred to, it might be worth mentioning that the convener of the group that wrote it was Jeremy Corbyn.
What is also amazing about the 1981 Manifesto is just how much which was denounced as radical or impracticably unrealistic at the time has either been delivered effectively or has become mainstream policy. One of the legacies of the 1981-85 GLC, at least in transport, was a group of fairly young people at the time who went on to hold influential positions in London’s transport policy for quite a few years after abolition of the GLC.
@quinlet – indeed, and one of the silent agendas of those of us tasked with renationalising LT was to ensure that certain key figures in the GLC were found suitable homes in the aftermath. It paid off, I’m pleased to say.