Transit certainty

Transit plays a significant role in active living since every transit trip involves some sort of walk trip. Transit use, however, is often seen or experienced as inconvenient, and often there's a clear basis for that observation. One way to make transit use more attractive is to remove the uncertainty about when the bus or train will arrive. The wait often feels much longer than it actually is.

Enter the increasingly ubiquitous smart phone. Transit operators have begun to release the raw transit vehicle location data and programmers have created apps, so transit riders can have the information sent to their smartphones. Three cheers for Transit 2.0!

Your Cadillac ain't hipper than my bus stop

It is a truism that every transit trip begins and ends with a walking trip. The catchment area of a single transit stop is generally considered to be a 1/4 mile radius around the station, though light rail stations may attract riders up to a 1/2 mile distant, which is about a ten-minute walk. (That's on the origin- primarily residential- part of the trip. The destination- or employment- part of the trip usually involves less walking because of the density of employment centers that transit routes usually serve.) So daily transit riders are walkers.

That said, I'm excited about the bus rapid transit stop that is popping up about a mile from my house at the intersection of 46th St. and I-35W in South Minneapolis. It's a rather sleek affair, equipped with bike racks naturally.