Week of 10/14: 10 Tools and Strategies

10 Tools/Strategies for Sustainable Transit

1. Land use policies and incentives that encourage sustainability vis-à-vis transportation. This is a broad “tool” that captures many of the practices in recounted Green Urbanism (GU), specifically the act of reserving the land that is near natural transit nodes for appropriate high-density or transit-oriented uses. An example is the Dutch A-B-C system (p113).

2. Lifting parking space requirements in new, urban developments. Most of the parking space requirements in zoning ordinances are incredibly egregious. As pointed out in GU and elsewhere, preserving space for automobiles merely engenders greater automobile usage. If it were impossible to find parking in Ithaca, people would (probably) find other ways to transport themselves.

3. Creation of transit villages. Going along with points 1 and 2, clustering goods and services as well as residences near public transit hubs makes car-free or car-reduced living much more convenient.

4. Frequency of public transit. No one in NYC ever has to memorize the subway schedule—you just go down to the platform and wait a couple of minutes until the train comes. Then you get on and get where you’re going, fast. TCAT is at the far opposite end of the spectrum, in terms of frequency and speed. The T-burg bus comes about 8x per day, and takes 35 minutes to get to Ithaca! Sorry, dude, life’s too short and my life in particular is not nearly predictable enough to make busing feasible.

5. Ease of use. Love the idea of “smart cards,” where you pay the fare on a bus or tram or train by using a declining-balance debit card. The ability to use it across different modes of transit is particularly appealing.

6. Tying into existing rail lines. Ithaca has a non-intensively used railroad running right through the main business corridor. By using wide-carriage tram cars as one German city did, we could tie light rail into the heavy rail and have a Rte. 13 passenger train.

7. Public transit itinerary creation services. Like the trip planning you can get by calling an operator in the Netherlands (and then arranging a taxi to meet you somewhere if need be), this could help take a lot of the headache/fear out of itinerary planning. Hopstop.com is an automated example of this, and allows you to create a route that is a combination of subway, bus, and walking. Way better than a street map and a bus schedule.

8. Congestion pricing. As London has shown, congestion pricing works. Soon NYC will be another example. If implemented in Ithaca, revenues collected could subsidize investment in public transit.

9. “Nurturing and growing a transit ethos.” So important in a place like Ithaca where it s perceived that only poor people, hippies, and noisy college students ride the bus. Key to a justice-driven (pardon the pun) system, where public transportation is not stigmatized.

10. Using sheep to calm traffic. OK, this is a little in jest, but I just loved the idea. I hate getting stuck in traffic or slowed down on the road, but on my drive in I often have to stop to let turkeys, ducks, and deer cross the road. The turkeys in particular take forever, but I never mind. They make me smile. My main point is the recognition that “no single strategy” will work, and that creativity and perseverance are critically important to reaching the goal.