The essence of so much architecture coverage.
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Replying to @marcelemoran and @zachklein
My 3rd home is the greenest
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Jarrett Walker @humantransit@mastodon.online
@humantransit
Public transit planning and policy consultant (jarrettwalker.com), author of the book Human Transit. Former literature scholar. Often looks at plants.
Jarrett Walker @humantransit@mastodon.online’s Tweets
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This Saturday come ride the @GRTCPulse with me and @scudderwagg of @humantransit! We’re going to be talking about buses over beers all afternoon for this first-ever @RVARapidTransit event. Meetup is 2pm at the Scott’s Addition station. 
eventbrite.com/e/beer-buses-w
eventbrite.com/e/beer-buses-w3
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Here in Portland, our government weather service assures us that last night's thunderstorms were "anecdotal" but were not a literary reference. Hooray for science!
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Given the date, some of you might have thought that a Sith Lord was channeling force lightning this morning. Rest assured that this was not the case and that widespread thunderstorms anecdotally occur between 9pm & 9am in the Spring/Summer. #ThisIsTheMay
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If you work in transportation tech, you should paint this on the walls of your office: “It’s About Space. Technology Never Changes Geometry” - #SUMC18
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Surprisingly, in the last 25 years we can't find another study trying to sketch the shape of this curve. All the other studies just establish elasticities, i.e looking only for a linear relationship. Are we missing something? Thanks! 2/2
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Transport scholars! In my update to by book Human Transit, one chapter leans heavily on the nonlinearity of the relationship between density and public transit ridership, established by Spillar & Rutherfored in 1998 but also a lot of my own expereince ... 1/
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All social services should be organized like Australia's Centrelink: All in a one-stop office, usually located in a shopping mall next to a public transit hub. This would save so many public transit operating costs, and emissions.
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I still find it strange that more municipalities and orders of government don't co-locate more of their services and service counters. I'd love to be able to get easy access to municipal, regional, provincial and federal gov't services in the same building, or even neighbourhood.
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Oregon: The transit agency in Clatsop County (Astoria, Cannon Beach, Seaside) just shut down suddenly, for financial reasons.
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Public transit folks: In the Second Edition of my book, I'm thinking of adding a short "recommended further reading" section. I want broadly accessible books about public transit planning/policy, US or worldwide. What books should I cite?
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Location decisions are moral choices, about the climate, about equity, and about civilization. What consequential location decisions is your government (or the CEO of your employer or vendor) making right now? 14/14
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When a government or a private CEO saves money by locating on cheap, remote land, and then bullies the transit agency into running inefficient service to that location, they’ve just transferred their costs onto the transit agency. And we wonder why those agencies struggle. 13/
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Sometimes, bad location choices (government or private sector) are driven by the attraction of cheap land, but land is cheap because it’s hard to get to! 12/
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Let us give praise, by the way, to whoever chose the location of the Social Security office in South Bend, Indiana. It’s right next to the transit hub. Very rare in the US. 11/
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Thanks to that location choice, Social Security clients may need hours to visit the office. Or this may become another reason that they have to buy cars. This is just one example. Check out the location of social services in your own town, and ask why they’re there. 10/
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Here’s the Social Security office in Chattanooga, Tennessee. It used to be next to a transit hub, but they moved it here. I see these decisions all the time. Each time, the transit agency is then required to run wildly inefficient service to get to these marooned locations. 9/
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Governments make location choices, huge ones, and yet I rarely heard them held responsible for the climate and social impacts of those decisions. A government decided that the Social Security or other gov’t office should be on a cul-de-sac in a business park … 8/
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There needs to be a lot more attention to the location choices that organizations make on behalf of other people: their employees, their clients etc. 7/
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But we must never forget that his situation was constructed intentionally, not just by oil/car companies or past generations of planners, not just by leaders who disinvest in public transit, but also by the CEO who chose the employer’s location. 6/
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Obviously, he is going to feel defensive about his “right” to drive. He is trapped in a situation where there’s no other way to feed his family. He may even oppose (de)congestion pricing in grounds of “equity.” 5/
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(Remember, helping low-income people not own cars is especially good for the climate, because they own the oldest cars, which tend to be the most polluting.) 4/
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Maybe he’s not driving a Lexus, but a ‘95 Camry that’s going to give out any day now, but he can’t afford a new car, or Uber rides to work every day. When the car abandons him at the side of the freeway one day, he’ll lose his job. 3/
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For example, maybe he lives in the inner city but his job has just moved from near his home to a business park on the edge of the city, a place almost designed to be inaccessible by efficient public transit, so that top executives have easier commutes from their horse farms. 2/
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Let’s add one nuance to this popular cartoon. The dude in his car taking 1/3 of the street space might also be a victim of oppression. He might be a low-income person who’s forced to own and drive a car for lack of options, and who is poorer as a result … 1/
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'When you're accustomed to #privilege, any demand for more equality feels like oppression.'
(cartoon by @fabiantodorovic)
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THREAD: Recently I was asked to participate in a TV segment about the recent manufactured controversy about “15-Minutes Cities” policies (aka cities that are less car-dependent with more things we need close by). See thread below if you’re not up to speed on whats been happening. twitter.com/BrentToderian/…
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Cheers for pointing out that Galway is a hostile place for🚶.
“It’s a thing decided during the development and planning of a city – it’s the most unique challenge for Galway.”👍
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“It’s true that bus riders are poorer on average, but the belief that ‘buses are for the poor’ is both untrue & harmful. In better transit networks, buses aren’t just for the poor, and because everyone uses them, they’re better for everyone.”
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New research in shows “a rapid and large-scale reduction in car use is necessary to meet stringent carbon budgets and avoid high energy demand.”
This complements our report showing such an approach would require much less lithium.
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Lets commit to never let the lazy attack that “public transit is subsidized” go unchallenged. #Transit IS publically paid for, as public services are, but with an impressive resulting return on investment, & actual public cost savings.
It’s driving that’s massively subsidized.
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Richmond, Virginia: Fun event coming up!
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Next Saturday May 6th @RVARapidTransit is hosting a Beer & Buses social with special guest @scudderwagg of @humantransit. We’ll be riding the @GRTCPulse to a few breweries and talking about how to improve public transportation. Meetup is 2pm at the Scott’s Addition station! 
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New York MTA's famous 8-second videos explaining bus lane enforcement are becoming more realistic. Be afraid!
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Transit geeks: Has anyone seen a report summarizing the average spacing between stops in the local bus networks of various cities?
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Clarification for international readers: Limerick is a city in Ireland. I am not planning to write limericks about Galway.
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Our proposed bus network design for Galway, Ireland is out for public comment. (Limerick will be out soon.) humantransit.org/2023/04/galway #busconnects
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An example: In Washington DC, cuts to the DC Circulator are being justified based on the cost of zero-emission buses:
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Focusing just on the public transit vehicle and infrastructure, and not on the transit *service*, is a near-universal mistake among decision-makers who don't use transit or think deeply about transit policy, especially in the US. 2/2
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