Here's an article about light rail costs and the cost/technical factors that will influence decisions about the route.

http://www2.tbo.com/content/2010/mar/15/151524/potential-light-rail-routes-tampa-have-challenges/

Urban Planning Game

Hello everyone,

there is a facebook application social city where you plan your own city and get points by how much your city residents are happy with their city and facilities. It is called Social City and it is very interesting. you can practice planning the city you want with walakability and hotels and business areas and factories.

USF Employs Automatic Vehicle Location System

USF recently unveiled their new bus tracking system. I knew that there was research going on, but I never imagined the USF Bullrunner having live tracking feeds. I wonder what this will do to ridership. I'll definitely be more likely to ride transit if I know exactly where the vehicle is at any given moment. The system removes the apprehension associated with uncertain reliability of the system. I suppose the real question is: How much will it impact ridership, and what are the marginal benefits of the system? Research will definitely be easier to conduct!

In any case, the technology is exciting and really fun to play with.

Go to http://www.usfbullrunner.com/ and check out the system. Future improvements of the system will include ridership count per vehicle.

The Official Press Release Reads:

USF introduces new bus tracking system - TAMPA, Fla. (Mar. 2, 2010)

The University of South Florida Department of Parking & Transportation Services is unveiling a new program Mar. 2 that will provide riders of the USF Bull Runner, the USF Tampa campus shuttle, with enhanced convenience and security. The program is an Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) system which is available on the web and can be downloaded on mobile hand-held devices.

The AVL offers several services including the ability to see arrival predictions for all buses at all stops, the ability to track buses along the routes so riders can plan their day accordingly, the ability to set up alerts for recurring use via text message and bus viewing in real-time. In April, USF will also implement automatic passenger counting on buses so riders will be able to know how full a bus is before it arrives.

The new system can be viewed at www.usfbullrunner.com. To see the application working, click on the "Live Map" and choose a route. As always, a valid USF ID is required to ride the USF Bull Runner. USF is the only university in the State University System that owns its own buses and offers the AVL program.

Those road projects....

Ray Chiaramonte mentioned some south county road projects that are the sticking point in approving the transportation ballot initiative. Here's more about that(sorry that I just can't seem to make this work as a hyperlink!)


http://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/local/road-projects-become-a-sticking-point-in-transit-tax-plan/1077264

Transportation Network Efficiency Expert, Slime Mold

I found a very interesting experiment that places a slime mold specimen in a situation that encouraged it to grow in a way that lent insight into Tokyo's rail system efficiency.

Some organisms have the ability to create efficient networks that allow them to access resources with minimum energy output. A team led by Atsushi Tero of Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan set up an environment that mimicked the Tokyo metropolitan area with food crumbs representing destinations. Researchers placed the slime mold Physarum polycephalum into the environment and allowed it grow and establish its own feeding network. The final result was a remarkably efficient network eerily similar to Tokyo's existing rail network.

Researches critically compared the organism's design with Tokyo's design and used what they learned to create biologically inspired algorithms for more efficient transportation network design. Innovation is definitely interdisciplinary.

Here are links to the published research in Science Magazine, a good supporting article by Wolfgang Marwan of Otto van Guericke University (Germany), and a concise overview from MSNBC.

• Rules for Biologically Inspired Adaptive Network Design
• Marwan Article
• MSNBC's "Better Transit Design through...Slime Mold?"

If the links don't work, try searching "Network Design" on sciencemag.org. USF's online database subscriptions include this journal, so you should be able to access it through the USF library.

"Mobility Market" downtown

I hope some of you will be able to visit the downtown Tampa "Mobility Market" on Friday, Feb. 19:

http://www.madduxpress.com/economic-development/2010/02/16/tampa-downtown-market-hosts-mobility-market-3696

http://www.shelterforce.org/article/1856/getting_from_here_to_there/

Here's an interesting look at how transit, land use and community development goals can be made compatible.