Travel Time would be reduced
Example trip has 3 legs: first 2 miles by taxi-van,
then 18 miles by express bus, and last 2 miles by taxi-van.
The express bus would be fast because it would run on roads with signal
control and
queue jumpers.
Red dots are transit centers (TCs) with air conditioning where riders
transfer from circulator to express.
Wait
time would be reduced from 30 minutes to 12
Taxi vans, on circulator routes, would
depart every 5 to 12 minutes with CMT.
The current system has circulator routes with 30 minutes or more
between bus runs.
The large, 40 foot long buses that Capital Metro
runs cost $99 an hour. This is $9 a mile.
Yet taxi vans can be run for only $2.50 a mile.
That is why it would
cost the same to run a van every 8 minutes as it now costs to run a bus
every 30 minutes.
Taxi Vans are cheaper for small groups
Vans are the more economical way
to connect a transit center
to the hundreds of employers
scattered over a 12 square mile cell.
Most jobs (70-80%) in Austin are in low density areas.
Computer modeling
predicts that most circulator trips in low density areas will have 14
or fewer riders.
It is cheaper to take 14 riders by taxi-van than by 45 seat bus.
.
Express
Roads permit fast travel by express bus
Green roads have queue jumpers and signal control to
permit express bus travel at 30 mph.
Think of North Lamar or Parmer Lane with Queue Jumpers every mile or
so, at major intersections.
On orange HOT lanes the express would do 50+ mph. A HOT lane is planned
for MOPAC.
Yellow roads are tolled. If managed right, the express could do 50+ mph
The light blue is the new 30 mile Commuter Rail from Leander to down
town.
Shoulder lanes for buses could be used on 183, IH-35 and MOPAC.
Buses on
the shoulder has been used successfully in Minneapolis.
Express routes would only stop at the transit centers (TCs) which are
colored circles.
CMT would be a combination of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) and shared taxi.
The Taxi-Bus, in Rimouski, Quebec, provides all public transit with
taxi cabs.
Typically, 2.6 riders share a cab. All rides are reserved ahead of time
by phone.
Ten thousand taxi vans provide the majority of public transit in
Capetown, South Africa.
BRT has proven cost effective
in Los Angeles, Curitiba, Bogota, Ottawa,
and Miami.
On a BRT route in Miami the ridership went up 250% after the bus
started running on a dedicated busway.
The busway allowed the bus to average 35 mph while car traffic on a
nearby road was doing 5 mph.
BRT can connect 29 transit centers, but vans are also needed to get
riders the last
two miles to employers spread out over low density parts of the city.
Spatial Mismatch and Decentralized Jobs
A lack of commercial density and the spatial mismatch problem
ensure
that conventional mass transit won’t
work well in modern American metropolitan areas.
Most jobs are outside the city center and spread
thinly over large areas.
From an article in the LA Times:
"Researchers
refer to it as spatial
mismatch:
In virtually every major U.S.
metropolitan area, job growth in
the low-skill sectors is moving
outward, while the workers most likely
to fill these jobs continue to be concentrated in the inner city. "
"Jobs are decentralizing but
affordable housing is not,"
said Bruce Katz, director of the
Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy at the
Brookings Institution in Washington D.C.
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IntroductionB.htm