What we want are diverse options. So it's not like by having para-transit something is taken away from bike infrastructure or from mass transit. But perhaps we've been conditioned to think this way due to the chronic underfunding of modes of transportation other than the private car.

That was my first fear when looking at this plan. I was concerned it would cut in to mass transit funding or try to replace mass transit. But this is a multi-modal picture-- and yes there is a gap there are trips that do not work well on mass transit, bike, walking or even zip car. For those trips the only option is private car. It would be great if there were another option.

Though, I must say-- in the long run city planning can help reduce the length and number of all forms motorized trips.

Seven steps to reinvent transport in your city

Virtually all of the necessary preconditions are now in place for far-reaching, rapid, low cost improvements in the ways that people get around in our cites. The needs are there, they are increasingly understood -- and we now know what to do and how to get the job done. The challenge is to find the vision, political will, and leadership to get the job done, step by deliberate step:

Vision and leadership: Open your eyes, break with the past, take on the real problems of mobility, well-being and economic health in your city.

Tighten time frame for action: Set firm targets for all to see and judge -- gearing all actions to achieve visible results within 2-4 year time frame.

Build a coherent integrated policy frame: that explicitly drives and aligns all goals, measures and actions so that they move together in interactive synergy

Frugal economics: You are not going to need another round of high cost, low impact investments to make it work

Focus Projects : Select FIVE new mobility innovations to lead your transformation, and then package and integrate them for success.

Ownership: Make your New Mobility program a broad-based collaborative enterprise that listens to and engages the whole city.

Pick winners: New approaches demand success. Chose policies and services with track records of success and build on their experience.

Last night I was in a car (which I rarely am) coming home from a very nice vacation somewhere east of Montuak, Long Island.

We decided to take the Southern State and parts of the Sunrise Highway to come home. As usual when I find myself in a car, I was deeply saddened by the "mall towns" we drove thru. Entire areas for miles with either no sidewalks or inferior ones with little street life. These communities are not like NYC and are never going to be. People drive everywhere. It is depressing, but sometimes you need a reminder that things aren't always the way you want them to be.

That said, we really need to be looking for different ways to challenge commuters and people who live in these communities. I think para-transit ideas are a good way to start a debate and see what kind of ideas the people who live in these kinds of places might be able to come up with when presented these kinds of ideas. Let the discussion continue. We will need many solutions to solve our energy and space problems. Para-transit ideas is just one.

Small electric motors can make this rate accessible to normal people.

If people do not want to supply their own energy by peddling and travel at high speeds larger motors are required.

The most comfortable human-powered vehicles are probably recumbent tricycles with assisting electric motors suitable for the broadest range of people including the elderly, disabled and mothers with young children.

Relatively modest infrastructure developments can be designed to enable long-distance unattended travel on vehicles similar to existing foldable electric assist recumbent tricycles which people will probably be able to sleep on if desired.

Fifty-mile round-trip commutes would not be a problem and probably faster and more convenient since they would be door to door on these vehicles.

If we were designing the transportation network of an idealized city from scratch, I don't know if smart para-transit would have much of a roll to play. But in a city where lots of people drive because driving is a much faster way to get around than other alternatives, smart para-transit can provide these people a viable alternative.

It seems that natural systems tend to be self-organizing and very resilient -- at no cost -- which could include New Yorkers making there own informed decisions and way throughout the city based on the information your data resource could provide.

Large vehicles dispatched by a sophisticated intelligent system is nice but, could it ever have the transformational improvements of say 40% to 50% (not to mention much higher percentages) of the population getting around locally by bicycles, folding recumbent tricycles, or other forms of small form factor human-powered transportation including hybrid human-electric?

Of course, the quality-of-life improvements to allow this type of mobility would have to be dramatic but, wouldn't it be worth the price?

http://xtransit.newmobility.org/

Starting in the early eighties leading European cities began to bring on line wholly automatic computerized taxi dispatching systems. I n a nutshell: each vehicle has a GPS, on-board computer, etc. and is dynamically routed so as to pick up the nearest waiting customer. In the best of these systems/cities (and there are quite a lot of them in daily operation today) the wait is a matter of minutes. And even when a given taxi does not have an immediate call for service the cabs are dynamically deployed over the city by smart algorithms so that they offer the best spatial coverage for that next call to come in. They work, there are a lot of them, and they can easily be adjusted to handle un-associated groups of passengers with different origin/destination requirements.

This is one part of the pragmatic experience base of Mark Gorton’s proposed new Smart Paratransit services. I very much hope that he and his allies will take this beyond a paper statement and find a way to demonstrate to New Yorkers and people in other cities that if we get off our hands and apply available technologies and our brains, we can do a lot about improving transportation in our cities.

And while we’re at it start to save our poor planet.

Eric Britton

PS. Here is a quick listing of the range of services which fall under Mark’s Smart Para-Transit heading:

Taxis (even in the single client variant, as least as an antecedent) : Limousines, Group Taxis, Jitneys, Line Taxis, Maxicabs, Shared Taxis (also called, among many others: Colectivos, Públicos, Peseros, Jeepney, Matatu, Gush Texi, Dolmus, Public light bus, Shirut, Molue, Bemo, Tro-tro, Poda-poda, Danfo . . . and lots more) ,
Ride-sharing , Lift-sharing (in UK also called carsharing. Watch out!) , Carpools, Vanpools, Buspools , Ride-matching, Hitchhiking,
Demand Responsive Transport , DRT , Dial a Ride, Dial a Bus, Taxi-Bus (Also Buxi, Busphone, Telebs, Rufas, ReTax, Sammel-Taxi, Texxi, etc.) , Accessible transit services ,
Special Group Mobility Services, Paratransit, Shuttle buses, Feeder services, E&H group transit, Medical transport, Färdtjänst,
Goods/freight delivery : Small package and message delivery, Grouped goods delivery/Clustering, Freight Village, Teleshopping,
Carsharing??? - Arguably does not belong here since in actual use it serves a single customer/purpose. That said there are a number of important overlaps and common issues, including the IT components of both.

This list is not big deal but I share it with you in order to stress that this is not an area in which we have to start from scratch. We will be building on real world experience.

Has anyone modeled this? I mean set up a kind of virtual test with various requests coming in based on accusal possible trips and looked at how the fleet might work? It might give a very very very rough idea of what size fleet would be needed to serve a given area with a certain density of requests.

I want to know more about the wait time-- the Swiss bus that someone mentioned on the last thread took requests 24 hours in advance. That's enough time to have a human sort out the routes.

Can a computer really do this better than an experienced dispatcher?

One transportation node that nobody seems to have taken advantage of (at least not in suburban Boston) is the neighborhood school: hundreds of parents converge on schools to drop off children, and then commute onward to work in SOV's. If schools were adjacent to transportation nodes (buses, pooling arrangements...), more parents might walk their kids to school to take advantage of the convenience. Not as techie as Smart ParaTransit, but takes advantage of an existing node: imagine, instead of 300 cars descending in chaos on a neighborhood school and then joining the clotted roads into the city, 300 children walking with parents who then walk another block or two to catch a bus or carpool.

http://www.nysgtsc.state.ny.us/HS-Forms/NYS-HSSP-2009.pdf