‘The science of public transit is not too complicated’ | Grist

A Berkeley transportation scholar offers an appealingly simple rule in Adam Nagourney’s dispatch on the sizeable subway and light-rail expansion in Los Angeles:

Robert B. Cervero, the director of the University of California Transportation Center in Berkeley, said that if the subway expansion cut commuting time as promised, it would indeed change ridership habits. Transit officials said the ride from Koreatown to Westwood by subway would take 24 minutes, compared with 50 minutes during the rush in a car or on a bus.

“The science of public transit is not too complicated,” Mr. Cervero said in an e-mail message. “It comes down to how time-competitive transit is with the private car. If it takes two to three times longer to get from Point A to Point B by transit, the vast majority of folks will drive. If it’s faster going by bus or train, then most will forsake their car and ride transit.”

Is it that simple? Social-science research proves over and over again that people are less rational with their money than we’d like to believe — which has forced the field of economics to reconsider once-cherished assumptions. It’s hard to believe people are any more rational with how they allocate their time.

Don’t habit, social pressure, perceptions about what’s pleasant and safe all affect which mode of transport people choose?

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The Internet IS a Series of Tubes: Real-Time Mapping of the London Underground | ReadWriteWeb Two of our favorite topics to geek out over here at ReadWriteWeb are the real-time Web and the Internet of Things. Today, we (like everyone else across the Internet, it seems) ran into a rather nifty looking website that merges those two realms rather successfully using open data from the London and U.K. train systems. The live train map for the London Underground is a nearly real-time Google Maps mashup that shows the various trains of the London Underground as they move about their subterranean travels. The real-time Web, put simply, is a set of technologies that allows the information we see on the Internet to change as quickly (or nearly so) as what it represents in the real world or online. It’s the weather forecast, your friends’ status updates on Facebook and the pitch-by-pitch tracking of an afternoon’s game. As for the Internet of Things, it is the connection of the Internet to everyday objects. In this case, it’s data on every train in the London subway system as provided by the London Data Store, an open-data effort with the Greater London Authority.

The Internet IS a Series of Tubes: Real-Time Mapping of the London Underground | ReadWriteWeb

Two of our favorite topics to geek out over here at ReadWriteWeb are the real-time Web and the Internet of Things. Today, we (like everyone else across the Internet, it seems) ran into a rather nifty looking website that merges those two realms rather successfully using open data from the London and U.K. train systems. The live train map for the London Underground is a nearly real-time Google Maps mashup that shows the various trains of the London Underground as they move about their subterranean travels. The real-time Web, put simply, is a set of technologies that allows the information we see on the Internet to change as quickly (or nearly so) as what it represents in the real world or online. It’s the weather forecast, your friends’ status updates on Facebook and the pitch-by-pitch tracking of an afternoon’s game. As for the Internet of Things, it is the connection of the Internet to everyday objects. In this case, it’s data on every train in the London subway system as provided by the London Data Store, an open-data effort with the Greater London Authority.

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