Human Transit: Old Principles, New Choices, New Opportunities

DATE: 
Friday, May 18, 2012, 12:00pm to 1:00pm PDT
SPEAKERS: 
Jarrett Walker, MRCagney

The video begins at 1:06.

Abstract: The historic divide between spacial planning and transport planning has caused many crucial insights to remain stuck on one side of the divide. When dealing with public transit, Jarrett Walker argues that planners urgently need a clearer view of transit's fundamentals. These are often lost track of amid the excitement of a particular project, resulting in development where efficient (and therefore abundant) transit is impossible. This talk reviews the much-ignored principles of efficient transit networks, bus or rail, and argues that true "transit-oriented development" must be consist with those principles. These principles yield surprising conclusions both about many New Urbanist projects, and also about the potential of 82nd Avenue and similar "sprawl arterials."

Speaker Bio: Jarrett Walker is an international consultant in public transit network design and policy.  He has been a full-time consultant since 1991 and has led numerous major planning projects in North America, Australia, and New Zealand.  He currently serves as a Principal Consultant with MRCagney based in Australia.  He provides expert advice to clients worldwide

Born in 1962, he grew up in Portland, Oregon during the revolutionary 1970s, the era when Portland first made its decisive commitment to be a city for people rather than cars.  He went on to complete a BA at Pomona College (Claremont, California) and a Ph.D. in theatre arts and humanities at Stanford University.  Passionately interested in an impractical number of fields, he is probably the only person with peer-reviewed publications in both the Journal of Transport Geography and Shakespeare Quarterly.  In addition to Human Transit, he also writes on botany, creative writing, performing arts, and a range of other interests on his personal blog, Creature of the Shade.

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