And you are here why?

Jarrett Walker makes the point that public-transit decisions are not made in a vacuum, that there are actual tradeoffs that need to be made between Ridership  and Coverage. If public transit agencies were charged  exclusively  with maximizing their ridership, and all the green benefits that follow from that, they could move their empty buses to run in places where they’d be full.  Every competent transit planner knows how to do this.  Just abandon all service in low-density areas, typically outer suburbs, and shift all these resources to run even more frequent and attractive service where densities are high, such as inner cities.  In lower-density areas, you’d run only narrowly tailored services for brief surges of demand, such as trips to schools at bell-times and commuter express runs from suburban Park-and-Rides to downtown Mind you, this goes dead against the idea of Coverage  - if you told the people who were squawking about "empty trains...

TL;DR --> Frequency and service duration disproportionately effect the value of mass transit, and cuts in them have tremendous network effects making the transit much less valuable .  Think of it this way, if you have to wait an hour for the next train, just take the car. If you can't get back by train, just take the car. Making it worse, if you make do during the week, but can't take the train on weekends, you'll definitely buy a car, and then you'll always have a reason to just take the car in the morning... All this from  an excellent article by Jarret Walker Frequency has three independent benefits for the customer, which helps to explain why high frequency is so critical to sustained high ridership: It reduces waiting, which is everyone’s least favorite part of a trip.  (No, a smartphone that tells you when the bus comes doesn’t solve the problem of waiting; we are still talking about time when you’re not where you want to be.)  The basic se...

From Bostonography.com , we have this excellent near real-time take on bus speeds in Boston , based on GPS data.  Well, technically  speaking, its either GPS data from the past 3 hours, or the full 24 hours of data from the previous day. From the description This map is based only on the discrete location reports from buses, which occur at regular intervals. This means that speeds are calculated based on straight-line distances between those points, not on the actual distance traveled by the buses. In some areas, therefore, speed is a little underestimated because the bus followed actual crazy Boston streets, not that straight shortest-distance path. Note also that the speeds are overall averages that include stops, not solely moving speed. The below is just a screen-grab, go to the original for the live version .

That is all

Xconomy has a lengthy yet compelling writeup about the democratization of transit information - and Google's role therein. The file format that Google invented in 2006 to make all this possible, called GTFS, has become the de facto world standard for sharing transit data. And now Google is pushing a related standard that enables agencies to alert riders about service delays in real time—thus answering that age-old question, “When’s my bus coming?” So far, Google is displaying these live transit updates for only four U.S. cities (Boston, Portland, OR, San Diego, and San Francisco) and two European cities (Madrid, Spain, and Turin, Italy). But it hopes to add many, many more. The part I find fascinating is that people still want to hoard information, completely explaining why it took so long for this information to become available in NY and DC, two cities that I spend quite some time in The rise of GTFS has also helped to spur a larger “open government data” mov...