As every transit manager knows, areas built since World War II tend to be very hard for transit to serve. Everyone who has worked in suburban or small-city America has encountered the cul-de-sac senior center, the hilltop hospital, the Wal Mart set behind 1/2 mile of parking, or the Social Security Office in the industrial park. All of these land use patterns force transit to make deviations onto minor streets. These deviations delay other passengers, make service less attractive, reduce the efficiency of service, and often causing complaints about buses "tearing up our streets." Postwar development's fragmented street patterns also force passengers to make unacceptable walks to reach the service. None of these problems are Acts of God.
Every problem was created in the course of well-intentioned decisions to approve a development, or redesign a street. Even congestion delays are the cumulative result of many land use and public works decisions. Too often, though, the transit impacts of a decision are not even visible at the time the decision is made. Even if a transit agency is "in the loop" on approving decisions, the agency is often ignored unless it has a firm policy behind it.
Recently, Nelson\Nygaard has done a series of Long Range Transit Plans that take direct aim at this problem. The key is to identify in the long term, 20 years in advance, the arterials that will support straight, fast, frequent transit service. These may include high-speed express corridors, which serve widely spaced stationlike stops, or they may be local bus routes with high speed and frequency. In general, though, these corridors are identified with the goal of supporting 15-minute all day service, the minimum needed for easy spontaneous use.
Primary corridors then become a tool to focus discussion of transit needs on the places where it matters most. For these corridors, Nelson\Nygaard's Long Range Plans have suggested features such as:
- Street classification policies that "lock in" the current transit operating speed with stops, so that the agency is not faced with adding more buses to maintain the same level of service as congestion worsens.
- Land use policies that require future transit-dependent land uses to be located along the Primary network, or if not, to mitigate the cost of extending the Primary network to them. Policies that encourage dense development along Primary corridors, focused around stops that are spaced for optimum speed. These may include building orientation policies, pedestrian connectivity policies, etc.
- Justification for a higher level of amenities on the Primary system, further reinforcing its visibility and convenience for the rider.