What Mobility Means

[#Metro]

This is a slippery concept that is hard to grasp. It certainly took me a while.

I define mobility as the ability to move somewhere within a given time.

The concept of mobility is central to thinking around PT, and it is closely related to service characteristics (i.e. things that are NOT vehicle specific).

* Speed (am I wasting my time in congestion? Is it slow? Would it be faster if I drove my car or rode my bicycle?)
* Frequency (will it take half an hour before it turns up?)
* Scope of hours (will services die immediately after peak hour is finished, will I be stranded if I stay back at work late?)
* Interconnectedness (will I be able to get a connecting service if the service is not door to door?)
* Coverage (If I don't own a car, will this service get me there?)

At the moment I can get to a lot more places more quickly on the busway than I can living next to the train station. And that's not because one vehicle has steel wheels and the other one has rubber tyres (as much as Brisbane Transport might want to seemingly promulgate such a view!), it is because one comes every 3-5 minutes in the off peak, the other one every half hour.

One has good connections into the suburbs and I can get around most places in Brisbane with it with services going to different places, the other one is not fed, has few useable connections and can only really take me forwards and backwards along the guide way (this is the kind of service you get if you insist on anti-interchange!). (Note this is not a technical limitation, but simply because the service characteristics such as FREQUENCY and INTERCHANGE with other services are all wrong!)

http://www.humantransit.org/2009/07/what-i-mean-by-mobility.html
http://www.humantransit.org/2009/07/what-i-meant-by-mobility-could-also-be-called-access.html

http://www.humantransit.org/2009/07/streetcars-an-inconvenient-truth.html