2014-10-21 – David Levinson, Transportist

Eric Roper at the Strib riffs on my dogfooding article and does a local study: Met Council board not big transit riders, survey finds

“We should ask whether members of the council have sufficient expertise about transit … to be managing a transit system. Do they understand the problems at a deep level?” said University of Minnesota professor David Levinson, who researches transportation systems and has written about the need for transit decisionmakers to commute on their own product.

…

Levinson, the professor, compared the low transit usage by the Met Council to the board of Apple not using computers. He has frequently criticized the lack of information at most Twin Cities bus stops when compared to other cities, including route numbers, destinations, frequency and maps.

“Having that experience of being lost on the transit system is probably a useful experience for [council members] to have to understand why their system isn’t as attractive as it should be, why it’s not as popular as they hope it would be,” Levinson said.

Prisons and Airports are both among the most secure places we have on earth, protected by guards, so that their residents (inmates, passengers) don’t mix with everyone else.

US Domestic Enplanments: Source The Transportation Experience: Second Edition (Garrison and Levinson 2014)

The core difference is that the prison is isolated so that the bad guys stay in, while the airport is isolated so that the bad guys stay out. To get into the airport, you must demonstrate you are safe, while to get into prison, you must be proven to be unsafe.

US Incarceration Timeline, from wikipedia

In the US prison populations and airport passengers have both increased over the decades, though seem to have leveled off in the past few years, such that we are perhaps at both “peak aviation” and “peak prison”.

Perhaps isolation is not the key to safety.