Transport for Suburbia: Beyond the Automobile Age

Front Cover
Earthscan, 2009 - Business & Economics - 241 pages
"The need for effective public transport is greater than ever in the 21st century. With countries like China and India moving towards mass-automobility, we face the prospects of an environmental and urban health disaster unless alternatives are found. It is time to move beyond the automobile age. But while public transport has worked well in the dense cores of some big cities, the problem is that most residents of developed countries now live in dispersed suburbs and smaller cities and towns. These places usually have little or no public transport, and most transport commentators have given up on the task of changing this: it all seems too hard. This book argues that the secret of 'European-style' public transport lies in a generalizable model of network planning that has worked in places as diverse as rural Switzerland, the Brazilian city of Curitiba and the Canadian cities of Toronto and Vancouver. It shows how this model can be adapted to suburban, exurban and even rural areas to provide a genuine alternative to the car, and outlines the governance, funding and service planning policies that underpin the success of the world's best public transport systems."--Back cover.
 

Contents

Chapter 1 Public Transport 101
1
Chapter 2 The Automobile Age
11
Chapter 3 Beyond the Automobile Age
37
Chapter 4 The Compact City
51
Chapter 5 Planning Markets and Public Transport
69
Chapter 6 Toronto and Melbourne Revisited
91
Chapter 7 The Busway Solution
111
Chapter 8 The Zurich Model
129
Chapter 9 Towards a General Theory of Public Transport Network Planning
147
Chapter 10 Planning a Network
165
Chapter 11 Every Transit User is Also a Pedestrian
183
Chapter 12 The Politics of Public Transport
195
References
203
Index
215
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About the author (2009)

Paul Mees is Senior Lecturer in transport planning at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. He is the author of A Very Public Solution: Transport in the Dispersed City (Melbourne University Press, 2000).