If You Want People to Use Public Transit, Connect the Places Where People Want to Walk
The Twin Cities are plenty big enough to support healthy transit ridership, but as it turns out, size doesn’t matter in transit. On last week’s Strong Towns Podcast, Jason Slaughter from Not Just Bikes and Strong Towns’ Chuck Marohn sat down to talk about what America keeps getting wrong about public transit. Building it in cities that are too small isn’t one of them.
In a nutshell, many American transit systems are underused not because the cities they serve are too small, but because the places they stop at are places people don’t want to be on foot. Transit has to be a “walking accelerator,” with destinations people want to walk in. A stop on the side of a 4–6 lane stroad in the middle of a business park by the airport will not be well used.