Abstract
In, we looked at the fixed radius around transit stops, the area where people are likely to find the stop useful. Transit’s market depends on how many people are going to or from places in that area. How many people live there? How many people work there? How many students are in schools there? How much shopping goes on? Planners ask these questions to gauge the size of the transit market and (more perilously) to predict ridership.
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Notes
- 1.
In table9-1, “Metro Area” is my term for what Mees’s table calls “City.” It refers to the entire urbanized area around a city, regardless of government boundaries. Think of it as the continuous patch of lights that you can see from an airplane at night. “Transit mode share for work trips” is the percentage of trips to work that go by transit, as opposed to car, walking, biking, and so forth. Trips to work are not the only ones that matter, but they are the only ones that are measured consistently.
- 2.
Governments keep track of their current and projected development using models that divide up the city into zones and record the population, jobs, and so on of each. Governments that are thinking in car-dominated terms may have quite large zones, because fine detail doesn’t matter much for road planning. For example, if you plan a huge industrial park next to a particular freeway off-ramp, the model may show the entire park as one zone, because all that really matters is the traffic that the whole park will generate at the freeway interchange. Transit, by contrast, reacts to very small differences in walking distance, so it needs a much more fine-grained breakdown, approaching the level of the development parcel. A good signal that a government is serious about transit (and walking) is the small size of its transportation analysis zones.
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© 2012 Jarrett Walker
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Walker, J. (2012). Density Distractions. In: Human Transit. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-174-0_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-174-0_9
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