Reinventing Transport

I interviewed the energetic Todd Litman, founder and Executive Director of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute (VTPI). I am a great admirer of his work, most of which he generously shares on the  VTPI website . If you want less car-focused and more multi-modal transport planning, you'll benefit from Todd's clear explanations of the key problems with conventional urban transport planning, why we need multi-modal urban transport planning and how to get it. Scroll down to read a summary  (including links to relevant articles and reports by Todd).   Or listen to the interview (Episode 3 of the Reinventing Transport podcast) with this player.  If you can't see the player,  click HERE  to listen.  If you like podcasts, please do subscribe using your favorite podcast app.     The conversation covered these main topics (more details are below but the audio interview provides an even deeper dive into these issues): Multimoda...

LOS? Was ist LOS? The traffic engineering concept of traffic Level of Service (LOS) is used to rate the acceptability of traffic flow on a road, using scores of A, B, C, D, E and F. Try typing " LOS level of service traffic " and almost ANY country name into your favourite search engine. You will quickly see that LOS is very widely used. OK but so what? The problem is, LOS is a disaster when clumsily applied to cities. It is one of the key ways that traffic planners stumble into the habit of making motor vehicle flows their highest priority. LOS is a key tool that blinds our decision-making processes to the possibility of having smarter goals such as those of the New Mobility Agenda , like accessibility , moving people and goods efficiently not vehicles, or making places great . The San Francisco StreetsBlog has a wonderful series of articles by Matthew Roth on LOS thinking and its alternatives: Paradise LOSt (Part I): How Long Will the City Keep Us Stuck in Our Cars? Para...