America has a passengership problem. That’s another way of saying that too many people drive to and from work each day in otherwise empty cars. But if you think of the problem not as one of lonely drivers but of missing passengers, solutions to traffic congestion and auto pollution start to look slightly different. The answer isn’t necessarily that we need to get all those single drivers onto mass transit, or even that we need to build more transit. Maybe we just need to get more people to take a ride in someone else’s back seat. All this currently unused occupancy – no ... Read More
Slugging — The People’s Transit
March 7, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Workers who have come down from the surrounding high-rise offices begin to line up on a sidewalk in downtown Arlington, Va., across the Potomac from the nation's capital, about 3:30 in the afternoon. They stand in a perfect queue, iPods and newspapers in hand, and they look, by all indications, like they're waiting for the bus. Public transit never shows. But, eventually, a blue Chrysler Town & Country does. The woman behind the wheel rolls down her window and yells a kind of call-and-response. "Horner Road?" "Horner Road?" repeats the first woman in line. "Horner Road!" And ... Read More
Changing Lanes
March 18, 2008 • By • 2 Comments
Next time you’re in the carpool lane, breezing past lines of traffic crawling along to your right, you might just want to hold that smirk of satisfaction: The advantages of the high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) system may be much more modest than you think. That’s according to a recently published study by Jaimyoung Kwon, from the Department of Statistics, California State University, East Bay, and Professor Pravin Varaiya, at the University of California, Berkeley’s Department of Electrical Engineering. They collected peak-hour traffic data at more than 700 points along California’s ... Read More
