Network_LA Transit is a conceptual design response by Gensler Los Angeles to an open invitation by Sci-Arc, The Architect’s Newspaper and LA Metro to shift people from their cars to public transit.
More after the break.
This design proposal is based on four ideas: • Increase vehicle choices in the LA Metro system to include alternative modes of transportation, which provide various scales of public transport efficiency. • Increase flexibility of public transport by keeping existing transit stops but liberating the routes that connect them so that it may respond more immediately to user demand. Also provide it an efficiency advantage with dedicated lanes and pull-in stops to allow for bypassing, as well strategically located underpasses. • Leverage existing data to increase flexibility and optimize choices by overlapping the location of all ground transport, stops and users through GPS to coordinate their relative positions, needs and capacity in real time. To complete this triangulation, a GPS enabled app – tripFinder – automatically scans the network to sort and provide the user with the optimum trip itinerary while also optimizing the current status of the public transit fleet. • Expand the network and fill in the transport voids by granting access to this real time information through the selling of licenses to more and other alternative ground transport entities. This business could also be a potential profit center for LA Metro.
The result is user-driven, on-demand system that responds to the needs of each individual rider, allowing the network to organically adapt to the shifting needs of its ridership to improve overall service. Los Angeles, as a city of multiple centers whose relationships are constantly changing, can now have transit routes that adapt to the needs of its passengers rather than forcing passengers to use multiple fixed routes.
Thus a software solution that manages the users needs in real time, and assisted by a series of relatively small and achievable infrastructure improvements could form the solution to Los Angeles Public Transportation inefficiencies; thereby avoiding the type of large grand scale infrastructure work that is very disruptive of daily city life while risking being obsolete before it is complete. This type of solution also speaks to the Los Angeles culture: in proposing a public transport system with personalized service, it reasserts the individualist mentality that has powered Los Angeles’s mythology for generations.
NETWORK_LA transit Gensler Los Angeles
Ideas By: Richard Hammond Robert Jernigan Hae Sun Kim Alex Webb Li Wen
Animation By: Tam Thien Tran
References: Commute Cost Based off of research by commuter transportation services and www.commutesolutions.org Co2 Level United States Environment Protection Agency www.carbofund.org City Ranking Information Random Comprehensive study on traffic congestion in urban LA 10/02/2008 2006 American Community Survey
