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Tag Archives: transportation planning
Good Transit is Fun
Here’s a nice read on how transit or public transportation should be fun. People won’t really use public transportation unless they find utility or value in using it.
Source: Good Transit is Fun
I won’t be quoting from the article this time. I’ll let you read it yourself and digest the content.
Happy Sunday!
Good Transit Is Simple: Lessons in Good Route Design
Here is a quick share of an article on good route design:
Source: Good Transit Is Simple: Lessons in Good Route Design
I won’t be posting a quote from the article as there is really no summary to it. The article identifies the characteristics of a good transit route as well as the “don’t’s” or “no – no’s”.
Article share: On AI as a tool for urban planning
Here is a quick share of an article on AI and its application to urban planning. I haven’t written about artificial intelligence here except maybe mentioning it along the lines of intelligent transport systems (ITS). There were what were termed as Expert Systems but AI now (including its potentials) is much more than the expert systems developed in the past.
Sanchez, T. (June 20, 2025) “In Urban Planning, AI Prompting Could be the New Design Thinking,” Planetizen, https://www.planetizen.com/blogs/135418-urban-planning-ai-prompting-could-be-new-design-thinking [Last accessed: 7/17/2025]
To quote from the article:
“Working across disciplines is essential. Collaborating with architects, landscape architects, engineers, artists, and technologists brings in diverse perspectives that can help spark new ideas. AI integrates knowledge and techniques from each of these fields. Contributing to a culture where planners feel free to experiment, where trying something new is encouraged rather than being frowned upon, is key to real innovation. Whether engaging with colleagues or prompting an AI model, creativity thrives in conversation and collaboration…
Cities should be shaped by creative thinking, and today’s challenges demand more of it than ever. Planners are in a unique position to combine deep local knowledge with new technologies, such as AI, to imagine, design, plan, and implement. AI should be seen not as a shortcut, but it has incredible potential as a partner or assistant with encyclopedic knowledge that helps planners stretch their creativity even further. As Wright advises, planners should challenge themselves with constraints to spark creativity: For instance, “What would you do if you had to write an entire zoning ordinance with 10 rules or less to make a sustainable built environment?” Such exercises encourage us to set clearer goals and find better solutions.
By combining traditional tools with emerging technologies, planners can design places that are not only functional but also vibrant, equitable, and resilient.”
What do you think about AI and its applications to urban planning including transportation and traffic?
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Solutions to transport problems: the combination of congestion pricing and transit infrastructure development
Congestion pricing and transit infrastructure development (e.g., mass transit infrastructure) are often mentioned separately or independently. It is as if they are mutually exclusive alternatives or solutions to our transportation problems. They are not and should be considered together for greater impacts and also to complement each other. While the article below focuses on the experience in the United States, the experience is Singapore as applied to cities should provide a model that can be adopted if not outrightly replicated. Singapore’s version of congestion pricing in the form of its Electronic Road Pricing (ERP) scheme has been very effective in regulating congestion levels while helping fund public transportation in the city-state.
Descant, S. (May 8, 2025) “Congestion Pricing and Transit Are a Necessary Alliance,” Government Technology, https://www.govtech.com/transportation/congestion-pricing-and-transit-are-a-necessary-alliance %5BLast accessed: 11/05/2025]
Quoting from the article:
“In order to move a congestion pricing proposal forward, “you must have serious congestion, and you must have good transit,” said Sam Schwartz, a former New York City traffic commissioner, said during a March 21 panel on the New York City congestion pricing program. The event was organized by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Mobility Initiative. Schwartz is also the CEO of Sam Schwartz Pedestrian Traffic Management Services, a consulting firm.
A recent report by the Mineta Transportation Institute at San Jose State University in California concluded roadway tolling — a form of congestion pricing — can serve the dual purpose of reducing traffic congestion and supporting transit options, if the programs are structured properly.”
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Planning for True Transportation Affordability: Beyond Common Misconceptions
How much do we spend on transportation as part of our budgets? Is it 5% of your monthly budget? Is it 10%? Or is it eating up a substantial part of what you’re earning?
Source: Planning for True Transportation Affordability: Beyond Common Misconceptions
To quote from the article:
“This research indicates that many common policies favor expensive transportation and housing over lower-cost alternatives, which drives the cost of living beyond what is affordable, leaving too little money to purchase other necessities. The result is immiseration: growing stress, unhappiness, and discontent.
The solution is simple: planning should favor affordable over expensive modes and compact development over sprawl. This is not to suggest that automobile travel is bad and should be eliminated. Many people are justifiably proud of being able to afford a nice car, and automobiles are the most efficient option for some trips. However, automobile travel requires far more resources and is far more expensive than other modes, typically by an order of magnitude, so true affordability requires an efficient, multimodal transportation system that allows travelers to choose the options that truly reflect their needs and preferences.
Affordability requires a new economic paradigm; rather than trying to increase incomes or subsidies we need to increase affordability and efficiency so households can satisfy their basic needs consuming fewer resources and spending less money. Our planning should be guided by a new goal: how can we help families be poor but happy.”
I share this article because it provides a more complete narrative and assessment than those just focusing on transport. Home choice locations and affordable housing are part of the equation. Looking at transport alone can be myopic and leads us to think it is the only problem to solve.
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On transportation and global health – article share
I was supposed to write about the keynote lecture delivered during the 30th Annual Conference of the Transportation Science Society of the Philippines (TSSP). I am sharing instead an article written by Dr. Renzo Guinto who is an Associate Professor at the SingHealth Duke-NUS Global Health Institute based at the National University of Singapore.
Here is the link to his article on the Philippine Daily Inquirer: Health at the center of transport and mobility
I will not quote from the article and leave it to my readers to read and appreciate the articles content.
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Article share: Planners’ Complicity in Excessive Traffic Deaths
Here is a recent article on safety and the involvement on traffic engineers from Todd Litman:
Source: Planners’ Complicity in Excessive Traffic Deaths
Let me note here about the interchangeability of the terms ‘traffic engineer’, ‘transportation engineer’ and ‘planner’. This is important to contextualize who is actually complicit or involved or responsible particularly in the Philippine setting. Too often and too quickly, traffic engineers or even civil engineers (in general) are blamed for traffic deaths or flaws in road designs. Disregarded is the fact that, as the article mentions, of the two major elements of travel – distance and speed – distance is often determined by the plans and designs of non-engineers. These are planners, or to be accurate land use planners, many of whom are architects by profession. We also want to differentiate between traffic engineers and highway engineers, who in the Philippine setting are actually quite different. One common thing about many of them is that they are slow to adopt progressive ideas or concepts of road planning and design such as complete streets and road diets. The outcome of this stubbornness is the specter of road crashes that lead to fatalities and serious injuries. But then they are not solely to blame or who should take responsibility for the atrocious road safety situation. The ‘distance’ component of travel is very much a product of land use planning and land development as practiced in our country. For many if not most developments, architects and planners are the ones who call the shots for the roads and transportation in the proposals. Traffic engineers are involved later and if not progressive complicates the situation regarding safety. Thankfully, some local government units are becoming progressive and are more mindful of development proposals including implications to road safety. Hopefully, many things will change among those involved so we can improve travel safety.
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Planning for Accessibility: Proximity is More Important than Mobility
Here is a quick share of another very informative article that discusses the importance of proximity and more dense development in order to reduce car dependence.
Source: Planning for Accessibility: Proximity is More Important than Mobility
Here are some excerpts from the article:
“This shows that proximity is much more important than mobility in providing accessibility: location, location, location. For the last century, our transportation planning practices have contradicted this principle. Transportation agencies built urban highways that destroyed and degraded accessible and multimodal neighborhoods to benefit suburban motorists. This was racist and classist, but the mechanism was the way that transportation planners valued increased traffic speeds, measured as travel time savings, while ignoring the loss of accessibility imposed on urban neighborhood residents.
Of course, many other factors affect people’s transportation and neighborhood preferences. Some people need their cars for work or after-work activities, and not everybody can bicycle or use transit even if it is available. However, surveys such as the National Association of Realtor’s National Community Preference Survey indicate that many people would prefer living in more compact, walkable neighborhoods than they currently do but cannot due to a lack of supply.”
Such articles are a must read for those who want to understand why government needs to invest in land at or near the CBDs, and develop that land so people will not need to reside far from their workplaces and schools. Truly, there are many other factors affecting transport preferences or mode choice. Housing is one such factor that we continue to treat separately from transport. It is very (prohibitively) expensive to buy or rent in the city particularly in or near the CBDs. The result is people opting to purchase or rent homes in the suburbs. It doesn’t help that developers are also actively promoting subdivisions there and therefore are contributing to sprawl that puts so much pressure on transportation systems.
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Opinion: The Arrogance of Social Media Urbanists
Here’s a quick share of an interesting article. It’s basically a reaction (I prefer not to call it a rant as the author refers to it.) and a fair one for those who are exasperated with the generalizations and criticisms often posted on social media that are thrown vs. planners. I would extend this observation about engineering as well. I suddenly remember discussing in one of my classes about how unreinforced concrete pavements are legit and not because a contractor or highway agency settled for inferior design or were corrupt that they decided not to use steel bars. It is very easy these days to post your opinion or criticism without understanding all the other (and probably essential) factors that come into play.
Source: Opinion: The Arrogance of Social Media Urbanists
Quoting from the article:
“What is the point of this rant, besides easing my frustration with my social media feed? It’s to hopefully educate those who think that changing close to a century of development patterns should happen overnight and that anyone who is not in lock-step agreement with the right way to develop is too ignorant to know better. No opinion has ever been changed by a snarky meme. Change happens through education, outreach, and time. Planners are not ‘afraid’ to build good things; they’re constrained by obsolete regulations and policies, deeply embedded political values, financial barriers, and the momentum of existing patterns of behavior. The goal should be to address those things and make it just as easy to build dense, mixed-use, walkable communities as it is currently to build single-use sprawl. If we get to that point, consumers will have equal access to the products they want, whether it be a single-family home on a cul-de-sac or a townhome with a coffee shop on the corner.
That is how we effect change. Arrogant and condescending posts on social media will not win converts to your cause, only harden their resistance.”
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Article on “Fair Share Transportation Planning”
I am sharing this new article from Todd Litman on fair share transportation planning. The content is relevant and very timely in the Philippines considering many people including and especially transport officials are struggling with the thought of allocating resources to provide or improve facilities geared towards more equitable transport systems (e.g., more facilities for active transport).
Here’s the summary as quoted from the article:
“To be efficient and equitable, a transportation system must serve diverse demands. A diverse transportation system allows travelers to use the most efficient option for each trip—safe walking and bicycling for local errands, efficient public transit when traveling on busy travel corridors, and automobiles when they are truly the most cost-effective mode considering all impact—and it ensures that people who cannot, should not, or prefer not to drive receive their fair share of public investments.
Current transportation planning practices are biased in various ways that overinvest in automobile infrastructure and underinvest in more affordable, inclusive, and efficient modes. It is time for planners to reconsider our analysis methods and funding practices to ensure that non-auto modes, and therefore non-drivers, receive their fair share of transportation resources.
This is not anti-car. Motorists have good reasons to support more investments in non-auto modes that reduce their traffic and parking congestion, reduce their chauffeuring burdens and crash risk, and provide better options when their vehicles are unavailable. Everybody wins from a more diverse and efficient transportation system.”
Caught (up) in traffic 