Economist Ed Glaeser follows my lead on suggesting double deck buses as a way to reposition transit use

Buses Line up on Oxford Street in London.  Flickr photo by DJ Fleer.

For many years, culminating in great detail in the 2012 entry "Making bus service sexy and more equitable," I have discussed how to reposition bus service in cities, starting with a conversion to double deck buses, which have been popularized as being cool and fun by their use in London and as seen in movies set in London (I seem to recall the original Mary Poppins movie involving some bus time?).

In the Boston Globe op-ed "Boston needs cooler buses," Ed Glaeser suggests the same thing.  From the article:

For better or worse, the obvious economic benefits of buses won’t win hearts and minds. We need tough medicine on the city streets that reduces stops and competing traffic. But we also need a heavy dose of design — some beauty in our buses. It isn’t free, but costs far less than building miles of rail.

Note that there is some use of double deck buses in US transit systems, but not in any of the major transit cities.

Also see the past blog entries:

-- Transit, stations, and placemaking: stations as entrypoints into neighborhoods
-- Arlington County's bus shelters and a public realm framework of quality
-- Illustration of government and design thinking: Boston's City Hall to Go Truck
-- All the talk of e-government, digital government, and open source government is really about employing the design method