Cities21: 7 presentations at our National Transportation Conference

January '01, Transportation Research Board Conference, WDC

Prototype Full Scale Model aluminum tent pole truss in our nation's capital (see other C21 and ATRA web pages for details):

Cities21's Forrest Deuth and Taxi 2000 Founder Ed Anderson. Click on image for larger version.

Between Tom Richert, Jeral Poskey, and Steve Raney, seven presentations were made. Here is a sampling:

Title: Small-Suburb PRT Ballot Initiatives. PRTinitiative_TRB_4web.pdf

Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) has been rapidly eliminated in three recent U.S. major investment studies. PRT is burdened by a past history of un-commercialized government demonstration projects. In the current political climate, a more effective approach uses a ballot initiative to advance a planning study in a city with a small voting population, but many potential transit riders. Two victorious Seattle Monorail initiatives provide examples of successful techniques and avoidable perils. An initiative provides a mandate to advance new transit strategies; however, an initiative cannot advance towards victory or successful implementation without the backing of skilled local politician. The initiative serves as an effective tool for political leadership, not as a substitute.
An Emeryville (California) initiative, with budget, timeline, and initiative text, is provided as a model for similar initiatives. For Emeryville, a San Francisco suburb with 6,900 residents and a daytime population of 27,700, a $17,000 initiative budget can sway 1,300 votes, affecting 27,700 potential riders. Rather than PRT serving as both trunk and feeder, a smaller feeder-only system is proposed to serve Emeryville's activity centers while complementing existing transit infrastructure.

Title: Privacy-Protecting Commute Shed Study. CommuteShed_TRB_111502.doc
A new methodology has been developed for collecting fine-grained employee commute origination data from employers in major employment centers. Many U.S. multinational firms have adopted the European Parliament Privacy Directive 95/46/EC, the strictest privacy law to date. The methodology discussed complies with this Directive. "Fine-grained" is defined as providing sufficient resolution (approximately 1,000 feet) to assist transportation planning of individual bus stops. Directive 95/46/EC provides for "anonymization" of data to where the data subject is no longer identifiable. Individual address data is aggregated to a 1/5 by 1/5 mile grid at the employer site using commercial geographic information systems software. Once the grid data is taken from employer premises, data is combined with those of other employers, providing further anonymization.
8,200 out of approximately 20,000 worker addresses have been collected from the Stanford Research Park employment center in Palo Alto, California using this methodology. While the sprawling spatial distribution of these addresses challenges many Transportation Demand Reduction strategies, planned transit system improvements should result in a significant patronage increase.
This methodology could be automated and applied nationally by the U.S. Census Bureau as part of their Transportation Planning Package, creating higher quality transportation data for improved investment decision making, ridesharing, and transit routing.