
Human Transit (2011) - elvinyung
http://humantransit.org/book
======
frankus
The book details a bunch of interesting things that aren't really apparent
until you've taken the time to think them through, for example:

\- There are very few inherent differences between buses and rail—most of what
we think of as inherent differences are incidental (such as grade separation
and offboard payment).

\- Running a bus faster is cheaper than running it slowly.

\- Introducing a transfer into someone's trip, all else equal, can make the
trip faster.

~~~
peatmoss
For me, hearing Jarrett’s perspective of technological agnosticism resonated
strongly with me. Each transit technology comes with various tradeoffs that
can sometimes be unbundled and sometimes cannot.

It’s hard for people to understand how good busses can be unless you’ve seen a
system of the sort Jarrett would hold up as an example.

This is one of a handful of books that I like to recommend to erstwhile
transportation geeks along with Vanderbilt’s, Downs’s, and Shoup’s.
Disclosure: I had a minuscule role in helping review an early draft of
Jarrett’s book.

~~~
wool_gather
Could you share the titles of those other books? Searching for a "Vanderbilt
transit book" only brings up pages of commuting advice from Vanderbilt
University.

~~~
peatmoss
Sure, sorry about that. To be clear these are mass-market books that I
recommend to people wanting to get a deeper, but still high level
understanding of transportation systems.

Tom Vanderbilt - Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do

Anthony Downs - Stuck in Traffic (and the follow-up, Still Stuck in Traffic)

Donald Shoup - The High Cost of Free Parking

And of course Jarrett Walker's Human Transit :-)

EDIT: The rationale is that all of these engagingly explain something
interesting that isn't necessarily intuitive or apparent to regular everyday
users of the transportation system.

~~~
wool_gather
Awesome, thank you for the recommendations!

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cozzyd
The site seems to be down for me, but if it is a link to what I think it is
(Jarret Walker's book), this is a great introduction to tradeoffs involved in
transit planning.

~~~
mlinksva
Another site [http://jarrettwalker.com/](http://jarrettwalker.com/) and
[https://twitter.com/humantransit](https://twitter.com/humantransit)

I'm not sure they've done any work in the SF bay area, but nearby I recently
ran across a background analysis they did for Sacramento which I found really
interesting [http://www.sacrtforward.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018/04/SacRT...](http://www.sacrtforward.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018/04/SacRT-Forward-Transit-Choices-Report-compressed.pdf)

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skadamat
Really good book, I really encourage everyone who's interested in cities to
read it.

