Auckland

New Zealand’s largest city…

faces many transit challenges, but Mayor Les Brown has defined ambitious goals, and Auckland’s dramatic ithsmus site is a promising location for a more sustainable city in the future. Historic commuter rail lines have just been upgraded to run frequently all-day, and will soon be electrified to take advantage of the area’s abundant hydropower. Auckland’s new government structure, in which the entire urbanized region is one city, radically simplifies accountability for transit outcomes. This is a city to watch.

Through MRCagney, a New Zealand leader in transport policy, Jarrett Walker has been involved in Auckland since 2007. He played leading roles in two major Bus Rapid Transit projects. The first, for the radial “AMETI” corridor (City-Pakuranga-Botany), involved a range of bus lane types and difficult bridge and station access issues; Read More

Brisbane

Fast-growing Brisbane is…

famous for its extensive river ferry system, and also for the highest-quality continuous busway network in the developed world. Transit in the region, though, must be managed for an urban region over 120km long, including the highrise resort area of the Gold Coast to the south and the long Sunshine Coast to the north. A mix of ferries, historic commuter rail, extensive buses and now light rail must be managed as an integrated network, the job of the unique (in Australia) regional agency TransLink.

Jarrett Walker’s long association with Brisbane-based MRCagney has put him in contact with key architects of Brisbane’s famous transit infrastructure. During his five full-time years with the firm, he did numerous key projects that helped define TransLink’s policy and position it for success.

In 2006, he took the lead authorship role in a Best Practices in Network Planning project Read More

Canberra

Australia’s national capital…

– designed in the 1910s on Garden City principles – features grand Parisian boulevards, intimate urban districts, and vast parklands lacing the city. It has several highrise centers but vast expanses of low density, spreading its 358,000 people over an area almost 40km (23 mi) wide. With a leadership and population committed to sustainable transport, Canberra is an urgent and fascinating challenge.

Since 2007, Jarrett Walker has played several key roles in Canberra’s transit planning, working with MRCagney. In 2007-9, he led the development of the Strategic Public Transport Network Plan, which articulated not just a 30-year network plan but also crucial policies and infrastructure that were needed to achieve the region’s ambitions sustainable transport goals. This plan played a key role in launching the transit renaissance in the years since. Read More

Minneapolis – St Paul

The Twin Cities of…

Minneapolis and St Paul are often rivals, but both have strong commitments to sustainable transportation, and are bound together in a complex urban region where jobs are being drawn to the periphery.

Jarrett first worked in the Twin Cities in 2000, with Nelson\Nygaard, when he led the network redesign study that finally combined the historically separate Minneapolis and St. Paul networks into a single logical structure, eliminating transfers at the city limits. The structure also created a more regular urban grid network for everywhere-to-everywhere travel. This project, called the Sector 1-2 Redesign Study, dramatically reduced travel times and unnecessary transfers throughout eastside Minneapolis and northern St. Paul, a dense historic area that includes several universities. It also rationalized the network for suburban areas further north. Read More

Portland

Portland needs no introduction…

as an early leader in sustainable transportation and urbanism.

Jarrett Walker grew up in Portland and has lived there about half of his life. From his first job as a transit planning intern at age 21 — when he contributed to network redesigns in several parts of the region – he’s been actively engaged in Portland planning issues.

He founded Nelson\Nygaard’s Portland office in 1994 and managed it until 2003, leading a range of projects around the region and beyond. His Primary Transit Network study for Tri-Met in 1994 was an early effort at clarifying network design policy for long-term planning purposes, and introduced ideas and terms still in use today in Metro’s Regional Transportation Plan process. He also helped suburban cities and authorities around the region form their own transit policies, and did major network redesign work for C-Tran Read More

Reno

Nevada’s northern metropolis…

has many of the transit challenges of young cities. Abundant road capacity and a preference for horizontal growth mean that transit’s productive market is confined to a few areas, yet the whole region expects to be served. In Reno, though, the entertainment industry drives intense 24-hour demand along busy corridors. Thanks to this demand, Reno’s transit agency is already implementing Bus Rapid Transit at the core of its co-ordinated network. The basic importance of transit to the city is obvious, though debate remains about how much it should extend across the region.

Working with Nelson\Nygaard, Jarrett Walker served as a lead planner on two revisions of the short range transit plan for the Reno-Sparks region in the early 2000s, one of which involved considerable network redesign. The resulting network, built around a few frequent “Primary” corridors and timed secondary feeders, has held Read More

Seattle

Spectacular Seattle is a…

city of steep hills, cliffs, and complex water barriers. These chokepoints for cars are often opportunities for transit and bicycles, and the City of Seattle has tried to make the most of them. The entire Puget Sound region is in the midst of a series of major transit investments, driven by a complex lattice of agencies including cities, county-level transit agencies, and the regionwide rapid transit operator, Sound Transit.

During 2003-2006, Jarrett Walker worked with Nelson\Nygaard on a series of major projects for the City of Seattle – a city government seeking to define its own transit ambitions and responsibilities even though its service is controlled by a regional transit agency. These included:

• The Central City Access Strategy of 2004, which looked at ways to re-arrange the use of lanes on downtown streets. This study was especially Read More

Spokane

The main city of Eastern…

Washington State features one of the world’s grandest downtown waterfalls, and beautiful hillside districts of historic homes, but beyond these attractions it faces many of the issues of Mountain West cities: easy horizontal growth and the challenges of maintaining strong centers, including downtown. Spokane’s greatest transit resource is the Spokane Plaza, a world-class climate-controlled hub for the transit system linked by skybridges to major retail and activities.

At the turn of the century, Jarrett Walker (working with Nelson\Nygaard) served as the lead planner in an ambitious redesign of Spokane’s transit network. The redesign replaced an infrequent radial network with the first elements of a frequent grid, introducing secondary connection points that allowed more people to reach non-downtown destinations without going downtown. This was a new concept for Spokane, and the process of building public Read More

Sydney

Sydney is a dazzling city…

for tourists, and its ferries are among the most scenic transit rides in the world. But locals routinely rage about Sydney’s disorganized public transit, difficult connections, and confusing fares and ticketing. Recently, however, a state authority has finally been formed with the power to force co-ordination.

Jarrett Walker lived in Sydney for five years (2006-11) as a consultant with MRCagney. Early in this period, he worked with the state Ministry of Transport on a series of network redesigns spanning the western and northern suburbs of the region – including Sydney’s poorest areas and its most affluent. These designs stitched together networks that had formerly been divided by the turf boundaries of contract operators, and began the long process of building strong orbital corridors to complement the intensive, crowded lines radiating from the Sydney CBD. Read More

Vancouver

Canada’s Pacific metropolis…

is proof the formative power of transit, walking and cycling when combined with a fearless approach to urban density. Famous for its mixed-use highrise form, which is being replicated around rapid transit stations all over the region, Vancouver also features a large range of sustainable development types, all mindful of the limits of space and resources. The system’s backbone, the driverless rapid transit system SkyTrain, delivers very frequent service at all hours, achieving a degree of simplicity and ease that few North Americans can imagine. The city and region remain committed to further increasing transit’s essential role in Vancouver’s life.

Jarrett Walker’s relationship with Vancouver’s transit agency, TransLink, has included two intensive periods living and working in the city, one in 2005-6 and another for six months in 2011. Read More