Like the Talen title, this is intended for professional planners, this time in the transit space. There are lots of obvious practical suggestions in here (more frequency begets more riders!), as well as more obscure but fascinating tips (like scenarios where charging a fare is not worthwhile). If you've ever ridden transit and found some of its weak points, whether in convenience, cleanliness, or logical routing, you'll find yourself nodding as Walker reviews some Hall of Shame-like bad practices. I was highly engaged through the book and tore through it quickly. ( )

Foundational. Phenomenal. This should be the bible of thinking about transit. Walker builds his definitions from the ground up, gradually layering in complexity until even the layman can grasp why his local transit is the way it is, and how it can best be improved.

For me, chapter 7 was the encapsulation of what I've long noticed to be the case: "frequency is freedom." No other service quality has the same liberating ability. To be on your way when you want and to be assured of boarding a vehicle in short order is what all transit should be, and is woefully underrecognized by transit agencies across the country.

Moral of the story: read this book. ( )

Four questions :
1. Ridership or coverage
2. Connections or directness
3. Peak first or Base first
4. Rights of way or shared spaces

This book reawoke my inner transport planner. It taught me about Frequent Transit Maps and now I want to draw one for Newcastle.

This is a very concise and clear presentation of public transit options in modern metropolitan areas of any size in any country. As a long time and frequent user of public transit in numerous cities in America and a few foreign ones as well, I found the presentation enlightening and crystallizing of what is already known to a frequent user. A similar transit user would most certainly benefit from reading it. Perhaps more importantly, non-transit users would gain critical insight to public transit projects for which they might be called on to support (or not) with their votes. The author's explanation of the traffic usage of San Francisco's very busy Van Ness Avenue and then relating it to Melbourne, Australia, was especially well done. Will a particular transit project help with traffic congestion or not? What are the criteria for answering that question? If I have any beef with the book at all, it really comes from a lack of acknowledgement how much a great many people in car-centric America intensely dislike public transit. For many, transit is reserved for the poor, the elderly, and the infirmed, or some combination of the three. No "normal" well-off person would be caught dead on a crowded bus or subway, or so they imply. When they have all spread themselves out to cul-de-sacs in far away suburbs, this book will explain why no public transit will come to rescue them from their prisons of traffic congestion any time soon. ( )

Jarett Walker is a transit consultant who has distilled his many years of experience into a framework for thinking about mass transit in general. Walker takes that experience and distills it into discrete topics with real world examples. This book reads more like a textbook in the sense that Walker has generalized many of the issues he has seen repeatedly and can then focus more on the bigger picture or how a particular aspect of mass transit fits into the transportation plan for the city as a whole. These examples were nice but made me think a lot about my own city and how they have dealt with these issues. In an ideal world there would be an additional book for each major city that covered how that city approached these problems. ( )