CART’s  2016 Annual Meeting will be held May 25^th, 6:30 PM, at the Clifton Center.

CART has been advocating for Louisville’s transit development since 1992.  Our advocacy led to the TARC T-2 Study for Louisville’s first Light Rail Line in the 1990’s.  That study was shelved to fund the Bridges Project.

Even though the Bridges Project will consume most of Louisville’s transportation dollars for the next 40 years, there is much that can be done to improve transit, mobility, and air quality for our community.   To do that will require persistent and coordinated work with other citizen groups and government agencies.  While there are grant opportunities available, CART is in dire need of an infusion of new members and new energy.  The existing Board of Directors has dwindled to four.   Membership has also decreased.

We invite all those with an interest in a healthy, equitable community to consider bringing your energy and your ideas to this organization.  At our Annual meeting we will be reviewing the Move Louisville report and discussing opportunities to bring about the changes we need for a sustainable community.

CART’s mission is more important than ever, but without an influx of new board members and an increase in general membership, CART will close it’s doors. We will be electing new board members at this meeting.  Please consider becoming more involved.

Membership in CART is $15 per year, and can be purchase at the door at our May meeting or via Pay Pal through our Website – CARTKY.org.

We look forward to seeing you and working with you.

Sincerely,

David Coyte, President

Once you leave the Eastern Seaboard public transportation in the United States is a local affair. The type of service you find in a city depends on the interplay among several factors including total population, population density, geography of roads and terrain, demographic patterns, development patterns, local and state politics and values, and local agency funding structure.  In this post, I use a tool published by the US Census Bureau called Distance Profiles to analyze potential peer cities.  The Distance profile provides a cross section of Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) populations that allows us to visually identify cities with very similar population distributions, geographic size, and density distributions. Using this tool we can make an informed comparison of Louisville’s transit system and those of true peer cities.

Fig. 1a Portland vs Louisville Population Profile. PEER CITY? – NOT! (click for larger image)

Fig. 1b Portland vs Louisville Population Weighted Density (click for larger image)

Once we identify our peer cities we have to be careful. All of our peer cities’ transit systems are somewhat different and it doesn’t necessarily mean one city’s public transit system is more or less effective.  Measurements of “effectiveness” must be based on the public transit values that each local community chooses for itself. Cities always make tradeoffs between coverage and ridership within a fixed budget. A city that values coverage will design a network that tries to deliver public transit opportunities to every corner of the service area.  A city that values ridership will concentrate their resources on the high volume corridors to try and deliver maximize ridership. The former provides lots of access to service but with very low frequency.  The latter leaves many areas unserved but provides much more frequent service along selected corridors.  All cities try to balance these goals based on additional values including social service concerns, the desire to  influence development patterns, mitigation of pollution, and  congestion reduction, and fall somewhere along a continuum from maximum coverage to maximum ridership.    We can also look at a peer city’s budget and facilities which will tell us more about the community’s public transit values and perhaps operational efficiency.

We will address these ideas in a later post, but before we can do that, we need to identify our peer cities based on their Distance Profiles.  Then we can evaluate their transit systems and infer the community values illustrated by their transit system choices and decide what if any elements of that system we can emulate.

Population Profiles

The Distance Profile includes two metrics: population by distance from city hall and population weighted density by distance from city hall. The results for each MSA are plotted on line graphs where each point represents a circular band of land one mile wide with each successive band radiating outward from the city center.  The geometry of this metric results in each successive band having a greater area. The resulting graph has a peak at the band with the greatest population or density then falls off as the bands contain more and more rural areas. Take a look at Louisville’s graphs. Continue reading →