Towards a frequent Network Map for Montréal

As posted in Montréalités urbaine and human transit, Montréal now has a frequent network brand. It’s called Réseau 10 Minutes max. Jarret at Human Transit has been making the case for frequent transit maps for a while now. The idea is that bus service that runs at high frequency should be marked differently from other […]


Hidden costs of Parking

Free Parking is not as cheap as you might think. At least according to Donald C. Shoup, professor of urban Planning at the University of California, who published a 733-page book on the “The High Cost of Free Parking.” The basic premise is that zoning requirements and regulations requiring large amount of parking act as […]


Suburban Missed Connection:
Train4Bus – When I arrived, you had just left

One of the problems of transit is topography. How can you provide good transit service where the population density is too low? Ideally one would want good service throughout the network, but of course that’s not affordable. On the other hand these areas still need access to public transportation. So there will always be a […]


Thoughts on Bejing’s “3d bus”

A couple of days ago, chinahush.com posted a video (in Chinese, English translation included) showcasing the concept of a bus running above traffic. The idea is that the bus is basically a moving tunnel, with a 2 meter clearance below for normal car traffic to drive under. Thus the bus can drive above traffic without […]


How a Bus is a Metro in Bogotá

Buses running on highway dedicated right of way, and can pass each other at stations

I previously mentioned that transit has received some creative ideas to implement systems outside of the old paradigms of subway, streetcar and bus. One of these ideas is to run a system of buses as a sort of surface subway, called bus rapid transit, or just BRT. The canonical example is Bogotá’s Transmilenio. It is […]


Welcome to Catbus, a Transit Blog

Why Talk about public transportation? Transit is not just a means to get from A to B. Transit, or lack thereof, is not a fact of life that you just have to deal with. It’s an important issue because transportation shapes our cities. It is directly connected with how livable and enjoyable a city, your neighborhood is. A city […]