Thoughts on a Jarrett Walker Post

Mount Rainier and the Port of Seattle from Magnolia Bridge” by SounderBruce is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

“What if we planned public transit with the goal of freedom?” asks public transportation consultant Jarrett Walker in a blog post from this March. A little over five years ago, a presentation that he gave planted this question in my mind. Having a background in software, and unaware of anyone else who was thinking about this question1, I started creating the tools that I would need to measure the freedom conferred by public transit systems. Within a year, I had sold my car and quit my job to focus full time on transit. I envisioned myself as establishing my own consultancy that would guide transit agencies through network redesigns using my software for generating measurements of transit network quality.

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