Steven Higashide

I began reading this in early 2019 was interrupted and finished reading it in 2021. The intervening events of the COVID pandemic and its effect on my home city showed how prophetic the different examples in the book could be:
* Temporary use of traffic cones & signage allowed the city to re-purpose streets for pedestrians, bicycles, etc rather than for cars in order to experiment with different ways to meet changing demands. Some of those changes became permanent, others did not.
* Light rail, which the transit district has been in love with, massively over-budget and decades behind schedule, was completely unable to adapt to rapid changes in ridership. Built to bring people into the downtown area from suburbs in the morning and return them in the evening, ridership plummeted. Buses that served other communities that still needed to get around and go to work were able to shift schedules, consolidate routes and adapt to the new needs
* attention is being paid to pedestrian and bicycle use of streets

Using examples from a number of cities around the US Higashide looks at how transportation districts have often failed, and sometimes succeeded to serve their communities. Particularly how a fascination with one size fits all fixes and the latest sexy transportation technology often fail to solve any actual problems, develop inflexible solutions with decades of high costs, and prevent public transport from being able to experiment and adapt quickly. He points out how successful transit systems have actually met their main customers where they are and worked to solve their problems rather than the problems of the city council, the transit lobbyists, or well-meaning activists who don't work to understand the system before trying to change it.… (més)