Related Comedy: Parking

From Seinfeld:

George: Look, I have my system. First I look for the dream spot right in front of the door, then I slowly expand out in concentric circles.

Elaine: Oh come on, George, please put it in a garage. I don't want to spend an hour looking for a space.

George: I can't park in a garage.

Elaine: Why?

George: I don't know, I just can't. Nobody in my family can pay for parking, it's a sickness. My father never paid for parking; my mother, my brother, nobody. We can't do it.

Elaine: I'll pay for it.

George: You don't understand. A garage. I can't even pull in there. It's like going to a prostitute. Why should I pay, when if I apply myself, maybe I could get it for free? (he hears a horn honking) What? What do you want? Go around me, I'm looking for spaces.

And people wonder why there is so much traffic!

Property Rights, Transit , and Urban Design

Property rights activists in Denver are fighting hard to curtail the eminent domain abilities of the Regional Transit District. While I do personally believe that the government shouldn't be able to just take your property and redevelop it at random, I also believe that there are certain urban design considerations that should be allowed when land must be taken for transit. At issue here is what happens after RTD takes land and builds a parking garage which is an allowed transit use. The second part is the ability to wrap that parking garage with retail which is what property owners do not want their land taken for, what they call economic development. This taking for economic development was the subject of the recent supreme court case Kelo vs City of New London.

Now this is a very thin line drawn in the sand, but what is the difference between pure economic development and good urban design? I don't think RTD is trying to take the property to build a casino or shopping mall. I do think they should be able to do as much with the land as they can to make it pedestrian friendly and a part of the surrounding neighborhood. No one wants a hulking parking garage on their street face or as a next door neighbor and RTD should be doing as much as it can to get a return on their investment, which in transit is ridership and revenue.
In order to get a return on investment, they need to create an environment that supports transit usage from modes other than the automobile and trip reductions.

In my dream world I wish that transit authorities had real estate departments that could buy up key pieces of land at fair market price (not through eminent domain) and lease them after the line is built when value has been created. I've actually wondered at times if a non-profit entity could be set up that raises money for the transit agency's capital projects. At one time the way streetcar companies made money off of land was by building lines to it. In Hong Kong and Japan, the rail lines make money off of developing property more than operating the trains, but they operate in a symbiotic way generating ridership and demand as well as an efficient means of transport.

I'm not sure how this is going to end up, and I'm not sure how you can legislate the difference between economic development and proper urban design issues, but there must be some way to strike a balance between ugly and nothing.

Smart Growth? No, Zev Growth!

Ah good 'ole Zev Y. in LA is up to no good again. For those who don't know, he is one of the good folks that brought us the Orange Line busway because of a law he created that said no subways or rail on that corridor. Well he's at it again saying that LA shouldn't grow denser. That smart growth thing is for sissies. But basically he is just playing politics with the frames. He's all about smart growth, just not density. He also wants to keep parking requirements...nothing says don't drive like an open parking space!

Urged on by some elected officials, city planners have decided that the "smart" and "elegant" way to grow the city's housing stock is to double the allowable size of new buildings,bust through established height limits and reduce parking-space requirements -- effectively rolling back more than two decades of neighborhood-protection laws.

What is it with these neighborhood protection folks that they actually want to stunt neighborhood evolution and affordability? It's actually not protection but rather a form of Nimbyism. What annoys me most about these clowns is that they just don't want any growth, it has nothing to do with Smart Growth at all. Here is a perfect example.

But it makes no sense to reflexively boost residential density and building size along every Metro Rapid bus route, as the city's version of the state's density-bonus law allows, when the streets that the buses travel often cross low-density, pedestrian-friendly commercial districts serving some of the city's most charming neighborhoods.

Let's not build more density near the high capacity pedestrian friendly transit. That'll make our transit work better! No one is going to go into the center of a single family neighborhood and build a high rise. All of this is just scare tactics to get elected. I for one hope he gets destroyed.

Acres of Free Parking Actually Cost Something

Over at my own blog, I've complained about the focus in the livable streets movement on environmental benefits to urbanism. It's not that those issues aren't important - it's that for most people, and certainly for most local governments, it's the pocketbook issues that get all the attention. So I was happy to see this piece today that discusses the opportunity costs of having your city build a Walmart surrounded by a sea of parking rather than a compact mixed-use district:

[Sarasota County Director of Smart Growth Peter] Katz showed the results from retail properties. Here comes surprise No. 1.: Big box stores such as WalMart and Sam’s Club, when analyzed for county property tax revenue per acre, produce barely more than a single family house; maybe $150 to $200 more a year, Katz said. (Think of all those acres of parking lots.) “That hardly seems worth all the heat that elected officials take when they approve such development,” he noted in a related, written presentation.

[...]

But here’s the shocker: On a horizontal bar chart Katz showed, you see that zooming to the far right side, outpacing all the retail offerings, even the regional shopping mall, is the revenue from a high-rise mixed-use project in downtown Sarasota. It sits on less than an acre and contributes a hefty $800,000 in tax per acre. (Add in city property taxes and it’s $1.2 million.) “It takes a lot of WalMarts to equal the contribution of that one mixed-use building,” Katz noted.

It's worth clicking through to read the whole thing (and printing it out for your next local planning commission meeting about that TOD project you really like).

US PIRG Releases Transit Report

The US Public Interest Research Group released a report titled 'A Better Way to Go' this week. If you're a transit advocate and need some ammo for any coming fights I highly recommend it. The chapter that most interested me was the one about underinvestment in transit. They did some digging and found out how much investment we've made in transit versus highways in this country and even I was shocked at the chart. And this is just highways...not local roads, parking spaces etc.


A few other pieces of information from the report:

Carbon dioxide from our automobiles equals the total emissions from Germany, Japan and Canada.

Commercial Parking lots in this country cover more space than the state of Delaware.

Rail saves a lot of oil with heavy rail systems like the subways in New York and Washington DC doing most of the heavy lifting. The chart below shows oil savings from LRT.

Transit provides a wide range of benefits including, reduced road expenditures, reduced cost from traffic accidents and reduced public and private costs to providing parking.

Investments in transit create 19% more jobs than equivalent investments in roads.

In 2005, the subsidy to highways was $39 billion dollars.

In 2005, the state expenditure on highways was $100 B dollars. Transit was $7.8B

And many more...

At the end of the report PIRG advocates that we stop spending money on new highways and shift to building more transit. The Interstate Highway Program has funded all of the necessary highways in this country and its time to fill the gap between what was neglected in the last half of the 2oth century.

The Noe Google Buses

These shuttle buses from Google (and other companies) come into the neighborhood in the evenings and mornings picking up tech workers and bringing them down to their respective south bay campuses. Many times I'll see the buses zooming up 24th street from the direction of the BART station on my way home and see them also almost bottom out at Dolores and 24th on the hill ridge. At times I myself will curse the Google kidz under my breath because of thier company heads' inability to locate near public transit so that these riders would patronize the system set up for everyone. How many of those workers would rather have a 15 minute ride on the J instead of a 40 minute ride to the campus.

I'm kind of torn on these shuttles. On one hand, it's a really huge freakin bus running up a residential street. But it is getting people that would likely be driving down 101 into more fuel efficienct ways. I don't have the same problem as others seem to have, complaining that affluent people have come to live in the neighborhood.



On the other hand, it's very stupid and un-environmental for these companies to locate such large office clusters away from conventional transit hubs. For all this talk of being green and forward thinking, companies like Google prove with their locational decisions that they don't understand how much transportation and land use plays into greenhouse gas emissions. But most of silicon valley is like that. Worst. Employment. Sprawl. Evah.

Because so many people want to live in a place that is walkable like San Francisco, you would think that businesses in the South Bay would look harder at trying to make more places like that instead of allowing even more junk down there. Facebook has actually caused a price spike in Palo Alto for helping thier workers live closer to work. I think this is a better solution than the shuttle buses but these companies are also skewing the local housing markets.

For "campuses" like Google, it seems that they could have built an office building downtown (they do have some offices in San Francisco) and saved more of thier employees money by allowing them to easily take transit to work. Instead they get more free parking which I would say if there is free parking at work, it is even more incentive to not live a location efficient lifestyle. Especially if you think you're special because you have solar panels over the parking. I wonder how much more Greenhouse Gases each of their employees emits because they drive a lot versus the amount of greenhouse gases those solar panels save.

Increasing Job Densities an Appropriate TOD Strategy

It might seem like a duh moment, but Prof. Gary Barnes paper discusses in a paper he wrote for the Journal of Public Transportation that it's not just residential density that determines transit usage, but rather where people are going.

Using regression analysis, he showed that in Minneapolis, aside from developing residential densities, transit share can be increased by building up commercial centers. In the regression, he showed that for every 1000 people per square mile that the residential density grew, the increase in transit's share to downtown increased 2.4% versus .6% increase when people went to suburban jobs. The same thing happened for increases in low income users. For every 1% increase in low income population per square mile, increases were noted. The chart that shows the results is below.



He also relates the concentration of regional jobs in major centers directly to how much transit people take. An example from the article is below.


There are a few caveats including the need for quality transit and parking regulations in these centers that encourage transit ridership. But just having a center of commerce isn't good enough. Places that have a lot of jobs like Pleasanton need to be better organized and less suburban office park.

Recently however, many people have been focused really heavily on residential densities, which are important, but I haven't seen many programs that create a regional job placement and growth strategy. This could be part of the key for increasing transit's use for work trips.

I have a feeling as well that pushing for dense commercial centers with mixes of retail and office then connecting them with high capacity transit will go a long way towards increasing transit's ability to cut congestion in the peak hours. It might also be a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts, creating a cycle of more transit and more office development in the cores of a region.

I know that this is kind of a 'duh' post. But having numbers to quantify the effects of connecting residential areas to large employment centers is really important in moving forward with policies that promote transit ridership. Thanks Prof Barnes for this paper and for your conclusion:

Planners and policymakers hoping to manage urban traffic congestion through increased transit use are limited in the short term by the strong influence that existing land use exerts on mode choice. While this point has been widely acknowledged, most research and policy discussion on this topic has focused on increasing residential densities. However, the conclusion of this article is that the development and expansion of very large, high-density job centers is the best tool available for most cities to achieve substantial increases in transit use.

While there are many ways to improve transit use, achieving the substantial increases necessary to impact congestion levels will probably ultimately require greatly improved service frequency or higher costs of driving, such as parking charges. Higher parking charges will be politically infeasible in the absence of adequate transit service as an alternative; however, improved transit service is hard to justify in the absence of a sufficiently large market.

Creating a large market appears to reduce to two options: the well-known solution of increasing residential density and the less-considered option of focusing on the work end of the trip. While both of these tactics appear to be effective in principle as well as practice, it is, for a variety of reasons discussed in this article, very difficult to have impacts on residential density that are large enough to have regional significance.

The constraints that limit the use of residential density increases as a tool are not in force to nearly the same extent for commercial development. A gradual transition of a relatively small amount of office space from isolated or low-density settings into a few large dense centers could lead to sizable increases in regional transit use in a relatively short time.

The Twin Cities area illustrates the possibilities of this approach. There are two downtowns, but Minneapolis is much larger and is geographically in the center of the developed area. Downtown St. Paul is relatively small and close to the edge by comparison, yet still attracts a substantial transit share. This hints at the possibility that even suburban locations, if they are developed to a sufficient size and density, can become major transit attractors.

Increased densities at the work end of the trip, by making improved transit service frequency more viable, could also help to increase nonauto access to retail and other nonwork opportunities. While higher density residential development can also have an impact, the effect is much larger when the increased density occurs in or around high-density commercial areas, both because more trips will be made to these high-transit attractors and because these areas support relatively good transit service going out as well as coming in. Increased commercial densities, especially in the suburbs, may be the only tool available for inducing significant transit use from the vast suburban areas of most cities that are already developed at low densities, and which will probably stay that way forever.

West Corridor Could Be in Trouble

I wrote a post previously about the takings issue in Denver. It looks like things are getting a bit heated and the line could be in trouble if it loses its ability to build parking garages. These folks think that parking garages aren't part of building the line, but the FTA thinks otherwise and without them, the ridership models drop and the Cost-Effectiveness measure kicks the Full Funding Grant Agreement out.

House Bill 1278 would allow RTD to acquire property by eminent domain only for "public transit purposes." Under the bill, RTD could not take land for park-n-Rides or retail or residential development near train stations. Rep. Frank McNulty, R-Highlands Ranch, a House sponsor of the bill, said legislators introduced it because "of significant concerns about the misuse" of eminent domain by RTD.

An RTD plan to acquire properties at Wadsworth Boulevard and West 14th Avenue in Lakewood has galvanized landowner opposition to the agency's power of eminent domain. If RTD can't acquire land for parking, FasTracks cannot proceed, said RTD general manager Cal Marsella.

Hopefully this gets worked out, but the way things have been going recently I'm cautiously optimistic.

Possible Capital Funding Sources #2

Garage Tax - What if we had a garage Tax? Every garage has to pay an annual fee to operate transit. I got the idea when i heard about a roof tax in England of 10,000 English Pounds per house in a transit oriented neighborhood. Well why can't we have a garage tax that makes people pay to have a garage on their house.

However thinking about it maybe now we should have a parking space tax. For every lane mile of highway that the road warriors propose for moving people by car, they are also promoting sprawl because all of those cars end up somewhere. That somewhere is a space in a parking lot at work. So for every employer who has a parking lot, perhaps they should have to pay some sort of tax for creating the need for more freeways in the form of a transit tax. Just an idea. There has to be some sort of linkage there somewhere, so lets do it.

Monday Night Notes

Hartford has been brutalized by parking. The loss of tax base to the virus of surface parking is staggering.
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Can you reduce GHGs and still grow?
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Is Paris more accessible than London? Some physicists say yes because the ants told them. Via Price Tags
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Can space be found for affordable housing in New York City?
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An interesting thought, the city as a living machine. How can we bring cities back to a pre-city natural state while still growing? This is an idea that is being explored in many places. A variant on this was discussed last year when discussing plans for the Lloyd district in Portland. It opened up some interesting discussion in the comments.

Free Parking Again

Another issue with free parking. Isn't there a market based way to take care of this issue around Mockingbird Station?

Why the Line MUST Go Up Guadalupe Street

If what M1ek said in the comments of a previous post is true about the route for light rail in Austin being the Streetcar route that Capital Metro has put forth, they are making a really bad politically motivated move. I'm tired of Austin getting a raw deal from it's political deals and this is clearly a political deal with outgoing Republican Mike Krusee (just like the commuter rail line was) and the University of Texas, both of whom seem to not care about the needs of the population.

It's been stated before that Krusee plans to use the streetcar as a redevelopment tool to turn over some of the parking garages at the State into redevelopment opportunities. I'm all for redevelopment and streetcars as I've said before, but if this line gets built, they're risking possible expansion and political will by not building where people really want to go. There is one route that is a home run that will guaranty expansion...Guadalupe.

Here are 4 reasons why Austin needs to start light rail with the best starter light rail line possible

1. 1994 Denver - Built a very successful starter line and used that success to go after a 119 mile expansion plan

2. 1999 Salt Lake City - Opened North South Line connecting major destinations blowing out ridership projections. Recently passed a sales tax to build 5 new lines.

3. 2004 Houston - Built a starter line through the center of the two largest job centers in the city. Ridership is highest per mile of any new LRT line in the United States. 5 new lines are being planned and 2 are expected to be funded by the FTA later this year.

4. 2004 Minneapolis - Built Hiawatha line which exceeded 2025 projections. 30,000 riders and the DFL party just forwarded a bill that will give the region 8 corridors by 2020.

Let's take a look at how to do this in Austin because you don't often get a second chance.

Through the Capital Complex



The red line is the "preferred alignment" by Capital Metro and the political backroom dealers. As you can see, the blue are parking garages and the red is existing dense development that is served by the most used bus corridor in the City (#1). Which one makes more sense? Go where the people are? or go where the cars are housed?

Through the University



UT is one of the largest Universities in the country. There is a large concentration of students going to classes every day in the area I've labeled main university where the Guadalupe alignment should go. On the left side of the Guadalupe alignment, the West Campus area where the highest concentration of students live has just been rezoned for high density mixed use. Think the Pearl District and South Lake Union. The Back Room alignment goes by all of the facilities that people use perhaps 8-10 times a year. The swimming pool, the track, the stadium, the LBJ Library and the Bass Concert Hall. The problem is, people don't go there often from Downtown or from up North. The area east of the red alignment is generally dead space...I spent most of my time at UT running around that track and just outside its walls. Not too many people there.

Next we'll talk about the more northern options but lets do the first section right this time.

A Parking Garage? Seriously?

What a racket. Two Boston area lawmakers are looking to take a large amount of funds from a pot of money that is meant for access and housing near transit and put it towards a parking deck. In fact they are looking to take 75% of the money for one deck.

Murphy, a Democrat who inserted the earmark at Keenan's behest, said the 1,000-space garage has been in the works for a decade and is needed. The garage would be shared by MBTA commuters in Salem who use the Rockport/Newburyport train line and users of a planned district courthouse in the area.

Murphy, who is vice chairman of the Legislature's bonding committee, inserted the amendment during the committee's consideration of the bill, which could come to the House for a vote this week.

"It's a legitimate project," Murphy said. "It's not like we're hiring someone's uncle to do something. I'm not going to apologize for getting something done here."

But the single-project earmark probably flies in the face of the fund's original intent.

The "transit-oriented development" fund, put in place in 2004 when lawmakers set aside an initial $30 million, has been used in the past to encourage people to live near public transit and to make it easier to get around without cars. Governor Deval Patrick has spoken often about his desire to encourage more people to live near public transit stations to encourage economic development around the stations.

Housing cars does not count as housing. Is anyone else tired of the car culture that believes its cars above everything else?

Giving Employees a Bonus by Charging for Parking

On the other side of the coin from the suburban subsidization is the money that can be saved by transit, whether its rail or an express bus. Richard Layman has a post over on his blog about when companies decide to charge for parking and give an allowance for transit. The original article was in the New York Times.

Streetcar Funding Source

Columbus has come up with a rather innovative funding initiative for their streetcar line. They are going to put a surcharge on event tickets. So whenever you go to a hockey game you'll pay a few extra dollars on your ticket. But it won't be for naught. If you have a ticket, you get a free ride on the transit line. Sounds like a great plan.

Coleman plans to send a proposal to the city council before the end of the year in which the city would add a 4 percent surcharge on tickets to most concerts and sporting events within six blocks of the streetcar route.

Another 4 percent surcharge would affect people parking in lots and garages along the line from Downtown to Ohio State University, and parking-meter rates in area would rise an average of 75 cents per hour.

“I'm so convinced this is the right thing,” Coleman told an audience of streetcar supporters last night at City Hall, referring both to the idea he first raised in 2006 and the new plan to pay for it.

Here is the line map courtesy of Xing Columbus, the local transport blog.

Magical Density Machine

In a recent email exchange on one of my numerous listserves, a bus booster has been trying to downplay the impact of light rail and streetcars on new development and shaping growth. If this is really the case, I have to wonder why those in opposition to such lines are always so worried about them changing the neighborhood. In a local Milwaukie paper (Milwaukie, Oregon not Wisconsin) a citizen worries about the density and character changes that will come with the rail line.

...all are part of a thrust by the regional government to dictate the forced density they advocate. Light rail is basically a density tool, and Metro’s vision of Milwaukie is as one large Transit Oriented Development hub and over-populated switching yard.

Much like the Berkeley regressive progressives (TM), its understandable that people are worried about change. But I believe this mans fears are unfounded.

As they expound on the wealth that density and rail will bring to Milwaukie, the throngs of people who will come to shop, the jobs that will be created here, I cringe. They have it backwards. Our valuable downtown property will be converted into park-and-rides or jam-packed transit-oriented developments with inadequate parking; the shoppers and jobs will go to Portland, along with the money. Remember, all roads lead to Rome.

Anyone who would take valuable land and turn it into a park and ride doesn't really want to make money. Also, regional centers don't drain to the downtown and the constant worry about parking belies a autocentric thinking that is all too common in this country. I would be surprised if Milwaukie's downtown didn't turn into a vibrant center.

If I were in opposition, I would just do what all opponents do, say the next lowest mode on the totem pole would be better and cheaper. This would effectively kill the density and the transit project keeping the status quo, just like the Nimbys want.

Locating Stations is Hard

Where does the station go? Novato has chosen to tell SMART not to put a station in their downtown. After looking at the map, it seems a bit silly to me.

But Eklund and other council members were concerned about the lack of parking for those who would take the train and the relatively small job centers. Councilwoman Jeanne MacLeamy said she expected as many as 1,500 new jobs to come to the Atherton area in the coming years on top of the 1,500 already there. There are about 500 jobs near the proposed downtown station.

Why not have a policy to push more jobs onto the urban grid that exists downtown. It's also the most connected to the residential neighborhoods meaning it will be easier for people to get to the station without cars. Stop designing for cars!!!

The top is a close up of the two stations under consideration. The downtown station was ruled out which with the experience of Caltrain seems a bit silly. The yellow box shows the jobs they are talking about which have a huge parking lot outside of the building. Why not develop the downtown more and create a reason for people to live in downtown Novato and take the train to other cities?

Rising Values Near Transit in UK

There is an article in the Times of London on whether purchasing a home near transit is a worthwhile investment. In London people are willing to pay a premium to be near a tube stop and values around areas that will soon be stations are rising quickly.

The extension of the former East London Tube Line will run from West Croydon and Crystal Palace to Dalston Junction, and will connect with the Tube network at Whitechapel. A second phase, due to open in 2011, will continue the line through Canonbury to Highbury & Islington Tube station. The average house price has already risen from £187,800 in 2001 to £317,959 in 2007, according to Hometrack, and gentrification has arrived in the form of the Dalston Culture House and the relocation of the Vortex jazz club to new premises, as well as several new restaurants.
...
A 2005 report by the Passenger Transport Executive Group found that all UK tram schemes have led to increases in commercial and residential property values, in some cases by 15 per cent. Rental prices have risen by 7 percent.

What is most interesting though is something we never think of here in the United States. The warnings to some are that retailers won't be around until closer to the time that the new station opens.

But buyers must be prepared to wait. “The change will not be instantaneous. Some people who would never have considered living in an area without a Tube line will come immediately. Others will wait for the retail and restaurants.” Scotford urges buyers to be aware that retailers may not arrive immediately to the area because current leases will take a while to expire. But it should not take too long.

The fact that they expect retail that is within walking distance is a little bit different. Here there are a whole heap of issues surrounding the type of retail and whether there will be enough parking because around the station extensions, there is generally not enough density to support such retail without parking or other help from cities, but there it's expected. Kind of an upsetting commentary if you ask me.

How Self Driving Cars Will Change Our Cities

Self-driving cars are getting a lot of publicity--and for good reason.

Some think that driverless cars will completely reshape our cityscapes. With fewer traffic accidents due to human error, autonomous vehicles would change the car repair and insurance industries. Ride-hailing companies like Uber and car-share companies like Zipcar could be transformed. One of the biggest changes, however, will be that cities won’t need nearly as many parking facilities. While there will still be a place for private car ownership, many major cities will end up having surplus parking space that can be turned into parks or even repurposed for new commercial uses.

But no matter how transformative they are, autonomous cars are unlikely to replace mass transit. One big reason is because mass transit is simply more efficient in terms of density. In cities, where space is both limited and expensive, a bus or train that can carry dozens or even hundreds of passengers will always be more efficient in terms of space and cost. And because more and more people are moving to cities, the real innovation that may come out of autonomous vehicle technology might not be the cars, but self-driving buses. After all, the US road system was built for cars, and it works just as well for buses.

Some experts fear that self driving cars will promote sprawl. Long, arduous commutes incentivize living near urban centers, but if commuting by car became much easier, the allure of city life might give way to the appeal of lower costs and bigger homes in suburbs. Many projections estimate that self driving cars could roll out as soon as the early 2020s, and since we’ve seen the effects of sprawl on health and economic mobility, it’s a big concern that planners will need to deal with soon.

Who Rides BART?

Update: More from Pedestrianist and Transbay Blog.

Lots of different people! The next question is how do they get to and from BART, and the answer is interesting. BART recently released a that releases data about who uses the system. I picked out some of what I feel is interesting data from the report:

1. The Majority of trips (88%) during peak hours were for work related trips. They break them out for mid day which is more even for other types of trips but certain stations have certain trip patterns such as shopping at Powell or medical at Rockridge and MacArthur.

2. 68% of BART riders have a car available to them and 21% of riders have parking available to them for free at their destination. However 42% of the folks who travel on BART only in the East Bay have access to free parking.

3. 58% of riders have been doing so for over a year.

4. What I found the most interesting, BART which was designed for the Automobile gets a large amount of car trips from home as the origin. Some places have less such as 18th Street which gets 81% of passengers from walking. 12% of people at Ashby bike to the station(Berkeley is full of more bikers to BART in general).

The reason the origin is interesting is the reason why the destination is interesting as well. The design of the system tells how it is being used. While designed for cars from the burbs, the areas that are urban get more walking trips. And the destinations are walking destinations too meaning that the more places we can connect with BART, the more people will take the line if close to employment. Also, if you have more urban stations, people use them for short trips.

5. BART Customers follow the makeup of the region in terms of income and ethnicity.

So there is much more information in there, but these were what I found most interesting. I think really it teaches us that we need to be intelligent in how we design systems. If we put more stations near destinations, more people will use the system.