Category: Transportation Operations

  • Smart Cards Introduced for Transit in Montreal

    A newspaper review of the introduction of technology similar to the Hong Kong “Octopus” cards. Could we do it here? Where would we put the readers on MAX and Streetcar? The good news is we have a relatively small number of transit providers to integrate. Portland has already rolled out smart cards for the parking…

  • From Policy to Practice: Clearing Accidents

    A few months ago I wrote about discussion initiated in Commissioner Adams’ Transportation Operations Steering Committee to clear non-injury accidents from our freeways faster as one relatively inexpensive way to reduce congestion. Yesterday in the Trib we read about initial implementation steps for this policy. That’s a pretty fast translation of policy to action in…

  • Thousand Little Fixes

    Lenny passed on this pointer to an article about Seattle’s efforts to mitigate the closure of their bus tunnel. The meta-message is that lots of small operational improvements may have more impact on moving people effectively than large capital projects.

  • D-Day

    Here we are: the first commute day with the Transit Mall closed. Yesterday’s O featured a chart with all the new stop locations (PDF, 764K). We just wanted to let you know that our Transit Surfer tool has been updated with all the new route and stop information.

  • The Little Things Count

    It’s must have been a pretty light news day, because Friday the Oregonian had an editorial about TriMet’s ticket machines. The gripes about reliability are real, but I had to laugh, because TriMet’s machines are 10 times better than Streetcar’s (we were ordering so few that we couldn’t interest a supplier with technology more modern…