The third important resource useful in considering light rail and transit alignment and facilities in downtown Sacramento is the NACTO Transit Street Design Guide. This is presented as a series of web pages with diagrams, photos, and resources. If you have the money ($50), it is also available in print or as an e-book. The guide is complex and deep, and a year after being published (April 2016), there is still more to learn, more layers to explore.

“The Transit Street Design Guide provides design guidance for the development of transit facilities on city streets, and for the design and engineering of city streets to prioritize transit, improve transit service quality, and support other goals related to transit. The guide has been developed on the basis of other design guidance, as well as city case studies, best practices in urban environments, research and evaluation of existing designs, and professional consensus. These sources, as well as the specific designs and elements included in the guide, are based on North American street design practice.”

SacRT has planned our transit network, and the city (and county and other cities in the county) have planned the roadway network that the transit system depends upon, but there has been too little collaboration between the two. Not none, as the two preceding documents shown, but too little. Even the city within itself has not always collaborated, for example, with the Sacramento Valley Station design not being aligned with light rail. The guide makes clear that in order to have a high quality transit system, streets and land use must be integrated into a comprehensive planning process.

The guide goes beyond design examples to principles of design and operation. For example, the Network & System Principles provides six principles, of which one is below, as an example.

Frequent, Predictable, Convenient

Reliability rivals total trip time and cost in transit riders’ priorities, and is essential to capturing ridership. Transit service is most valuable for riders when it is always coming soon throughout the day, allowing riders to easily take both routine and spontaneous trips

Specific diagrams from the guide will be used to illustrate solutions suggested for downtown Sacramento streets.

Next up: Human Transit

• transit