Earlier this year, I slowly stumbled across something that I don’t think is well-known in comparative public transportation: European cities have much higher public transport ridership than s…| Pedestrian Observations
Update 2017/7/1: this is the most linked-to post of mine about construction costs, even though the dataset here is relatively small. You can see links to more posts, with more datapoints, on my sta…| Pedestrian Observations
In the Sweden case, I contrasted the emerging UK-influenced norms of infrastructure project delivery, which I called the globalized system, with the way Nordic procurement was previously done, whic…| Pedestrian Observations
Hayden Clarkin, inspired by the ongoing YIMBYTown conference in New Haven, asks me about rail capacity on transit-oriented development, in a way that reminds me of Donald Shoup’s critique of …| Pedestrian Observations
Thijs Niks made a web applet for calculating high-speed rail network ridership estimates. This is based on the gravity model that I’ve used to construct estimates. The applet lets one add gra…| Pedestrian Observations
Two weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal wrote this piece about our Northeast Corridor report. Much of it was based on a series of interviews William Boston did with me, explaining what the main needs on the corridor are. One element stands out since the MTA responded to what I was saying about schedule padding […]| Pedestrian Observations
David Schleicher has a proposal for how Congress can speed up infrastructure construction and reduce costs for megaprojects. Writing about what further research needs to be done, he distinguishes reasons from explanations. I have argued that many of the stories we tell about infrastructure costs involve explanations but not reasons. There are plenty of explanations […]| Pedestrian Observations
There are a few examples of rail projects that fail in a way that poisons the entire idea among decisionmakers. The failures can be total, to the point that the project isn’t built and nobody tries it again. Or the outcome can be a mixed blessing: an open project with some ridership, but not enough […]| Pedestrian Observations
A recent discussion about the Nuremberg U-Bahn got me thinking about the issue of transfers from infrequent to frequent vehicles and how they can disrupt service. The issue is that driverless metros like Nuremberg’s rely on very high frequency on relatively small vehicles in order to maintain adequate capacity; Nuremberg has the lowest U-Bahn construction […]| Pedestrian Observations
People in my comments and on social media are taking it for granted that investments into modernizing commuter rail predominantly benefit the suburbs. Against that, I’d like to point out how …| Pedestrian Observations
For Walkability and Good Transit, and Against Boondoggles and Pollution| Pedestrian Observations
Dutch high-speed rail is the original case of premature commitment and lock-in. A decision was made in 1991 that the Netherlands needed 300 km/h high-speed rail, imitating the TGV, which at that po…| Pedestrian Observations
A new high-speed line (NBS) between Hamburg and Hanover has received the approval of the government, and will go up for a Bundestag vote shortly. The line has been proposed and planned in various f…| Pedestrian Observations
I’m sitting on a EuroCity train from Copenhagen back to Germany. It’s timetabled to take 4:45 to do 520 km, an average speed of 110 km/h, and the train departed 25 minutes late because …| Pedestrian Observations
I made an off-hand remark about subway-surface systems, called Stadtbahn in German (as is, confusingly, the fully grade-separated east-west Berlin S-Bahn line), regarding a small three-line single-…| Pedestrian Observations
A few years ago, when I started writing timetables for proposed regional rail lines, I realized how much faster they were than current schedules. This goes beyond the usual issues in Boston with el…| Pedestrian Observations
The Regional Plan Association ran an event 2.5 days ago about New York commuter rail improvements and Penn Station, defending the $16.7 billion Penn Station Expansion proposal as necessary for capa…| Pedestrian Observations
