Human Transit

branding individual routes: too many colors, or the gold standard of legibility?

 

What might we learn from this bus? (click to enlarge)

 

Inner Link is one of four Auckland bus lines -- all very frequent and designed to be useful for a wide range of trips -- that have buses painted specifically for the purpose.  The other three are Outer Link (orange), City Link (red), and Northern Express (black).  In each case, the paint job is all about making it look easy to hop on.  Note that the bus assures you of the maximum fare you'll pay, and that the list of destinations along the top of the bus gives confidence about exactly where this bus will take you.  (For an Aucklander, these names are all familiar landmarks, so anyone can mentally string them together into a general sense of route.)  

It's important, too, that this is one of Auckland's newer buses.  The big, clear windows are important.  In fact, if it weren't for the maddening bus wrap, this bus would be entirely transparent, so that you could see the people on board and even make out the city beyond it.  This bus arises from European designs that are intentionally gentle on the eye, and whose transparency starts to undermine complaints about a "wall of buses."

When I first saw the branding of these buses in Auckland, I found them irritating.  These buses were announcing simple, legible, frequent routes in a way that marketed them effectively enough, but did nothing to convey that they are part of a larger network of services designed to work together.  Of course, the reality of today's network in Auckland (unlike the one Auckland Transport has in the works) is that it is a confusing tangle of infrequent and overlapping services that is almost impossible to make clear.  [PDF]  

In the context of all that chaos, you needed these strong route-level brands like Inner Link to stand out as something useful.   And now that we plan to create over 20 bus routes that are as clear and legible as this one, the question arises, should we continue to brand them this way, each one separately, perhaps in a lively diversity of colors from goldenrod to teal?

Compare this to what Los Angeles Metro did, dividing its fleet of 1000+ buses mostly into just two colors, red for Rapid and orange for Local.  This has helped everyone see the faster Metro Rapid buses, but how much more might be achieved if you could paint a bus with both icons and information that would celebrate its role as, say, the Venice Blvd. Rapid?

The marketing and legibility question, of course is:  Would the diversity of looks (perhaps in the context of shared design elements that mean "Rapid") make the system look simpler or more complicated?  In Los Angeles I'm not sure.  In Auckland, where the system as a whole could hardly look more complicated than it does today, the call seems easier.  

The issue for operations is the risk of fleet diversity.  In almost any transit agency, the operations folks will tell you they need maximum flexibility to deploy any bus on any route.  In some big-city agencies I've worked with, operating bases ("depots" in British) store buses in long stacks, where buses can be sent out only in the sequence that they came in the previous night.  Every new factor of fleet specialization becomes a new threat to getting the right bus on the right route every morning -- an admittedly heroic effort if you've toured some of the grimmer, overcrowded facilities involved.

So a separate color for every route would be a non-starter in most of North America.  Yet if we designed operating bases so that you could access any bus, or even could just have much shorter stacks, it's not obviously outrageous.  For each route, you'd paint enough buses to run just 80-100% of the midday fleet requirement.  You'd never have more painted buses than you could use.  You'd also have a supply of generic buses that could be added to any route, either as replacements for buses in the shop or as supplemental peak service.  And you'd only do this for routes with high all-day frequency seven days a week and relatively little additional service added at peaks.

In certain contexts -- especially in a case like Auckland where the whole city must learn a new story about the usefulness of buses -- it might make sense.  Even if we end up with goldenrod and teal.

should u.s. federal transit spending aim to redistribute wealth? (guest post by alexis grant)

Alexis Grant holds an M. Sc in Speech and Language Processing from the University of Edinburgh and is an active transportation advocate in Portland, Oregon. She enjoys shaping and interpreting complex systems for the benefit of their users and riding her bike around Portland. You can find her on Twitter @lyspeth.

Should the goal of US Federal transit spending be the redistribution of wealth?

The Transport Politic’s Yonah Freemark recently examined data from the 65 largest American metropolitan areas to provide a deeper look at his assertion that local funding for transit operations tends to depend on local income rather than on ‘need’, magnifying “seriously inequitable outcomes”:

The data demonstrate that increasing local and state transit operations spending is closely correlated with metro area median household income. This is not the case for federal aid, as minimal as it is. In addition, though cities and states with more progressive electoral tendencies appear to be able to increase local funding for transit operations, that contribution may be significantly limited by the incomes of local inhabitants.

Freemark argues that this is problematic: “Since public transportation is a vital social service, this has the perverse impact of providing the least support to the regions that likely need it most."

When I first read this line, I paused over “vital social service”, wondering whether he meant “vital public service”, but the article as well as his prior coverage of the topic makes clear that he meant just what he said: here, transit is being depicted as a social service provided to people who can’t afford other ways of getting mobility:

If public transportation is an essential social service — almost as important to our society as Medicare or Medicaid or Social Security (that is what we think, right?) — then how is it fair for the people who live in the poorest metropolitan areas to suffer from inadequate transportation services?

Freemark seems to be advocating here for addressing a perceived inequity that relates to only one of the two common goals of transit: what Jarrett Walker calls the Coverage Goal (Human Transit, Chapter 10).

The Coverage Goal reflects the “social service objective” that Freemark is appealing to, “meeting the needs of people who are especially reliant on transit”, in this case primarily due to lack of wealth, or poverty. When aiming for high coverage, agencies provide service broadly, including to those who may be difficult to serve because of poor connectivity or low density but also need the service more.

The other major goal, the Ridership Goal, reflects the desire to provide efficient and effective service by serving the most people at the least cost. Services oriented to the Ridership Goal focus on important destinations and corridors and may separate services or stops by larger distances to speed travel and avoid overspending on overlapping service.

While Walker discusses the Ridership-Coverage tradeoff mostly in the context of local decision-making, the same idea can be applied to state or federal funding.  Federal funding can pursue an ideal of maximum ridership; that would mean lots of money for big cities, where ridership potential is high, and none for Wyoming.  Or, it can focus on spreading out the resource, pursuing a Coverage goal, based either on a political ideal of equity or, as Freemark proposes, an explicitly redistributive view that spends more in poorer communities.

Freemark positions his work in contrast to academics and commentators profiled by Eric Jaffe at The Atlantic, who argue “too many projects...are poorly designed or executed, in part because of federal sway”. He pictures the redistributive power of the federal government as a positive force necessary to overcome the inability of some local governments to raise the amount of funds their areas ‘need’ to meet their presumed Coverage goals. Yet his vision of how this would make for “better projects” only asserts that it would be more fair.

Cities, left to their own devices, will restrict funding on transit operations based on the income of their inhabitants, not based on need. It is not rational that the state and local funding for transit in San Jose is more than six times higher than that in Fresno, just 150 miles apart, much because of the latter’s significantly lower household incomes and more Republican voting tendencies. Fresno, after all, has more than double the poverty rate of San Jose and thus has a significant transit-dependent population that is not being appropriately served....

To dismiss the federal government’s role is to ignore its important redistributive powers — its ability to transfer tax revenues from wealthier regions to poorer ones to help contribute to a more just society.

Coverage and equity goals tend to be in tension with ridership and mode-share goals, and by focusing solely on the coverage side of the equation, Freemark provides an incomplete picture of what the role of federal funding could or should be. Do all communities have the same goals for their transit systems, and do they want to serve the same populations? Should they? An equally good argument can be made that limited federal dollars should be spent on providing service that reaches the most people for the least amount of money.  That, too, could be called fair.

In his transit planning outreach, Walker “emphasize[s] how the geography of transit generates choices among competing values, which is why citizens and their elected officials ultimately need to make the decision.” What kind of transit to fund, and how much money to devote to it, is not merely a question of the availability of money, but also a value judgment, one that the local area has to make for itself. A more conservative community’s funding choices may be in part a reflection of their values, just as their voting behavior is.

Federal funding for transit operations could provide a valuable resource for local governments that would like to do more, but can’t afford to.  But Federal funding also relies on evidence of local financial support or “match.”  Local government must decide whether it would like to fund additional transit, and if so, what the goal of that transit should be. In discussing the role of federal funding, no one is well served by assuming all cities would make that decision with the same goals in mind.

 

sim city will continue to mislead on transit

Ian Miles Cheong updates us on the struggles of Electronic Arts to get the new SimCity right.  But it sounds like EA is committed to the original SimCity idea that the user can place stations and pieces of track, but the program will decide the paths that the buses and trains follow.  And it doesn't decide very well.  Key quote from EA's designer Guillaume Pierre:

1. If there are 300 Sims waiting for the streetcar on the other side of the loop for example, they may have to wait a long time for the vehicles to make their way. To remedy this problem, we’re looking into make crowded stops “high priority pick-up” destinations that transit vehicles will go to first.

2. Another problem is that, well, all the vehicles that are in the same area and want to go to the same destination type will all follow the same path, resulting in clumping and general traffic problems. We’re looking into various ways to improve the situation so traffic will spread out better.

If this all sounds oddly like demand-responsive service, well, that's more or less the model of fixed route service -- even subways -- that EA is using.  

I criticized Sim City (original and version 4) long ago, but my understanding that EA's priority continues to be "immersiveness" for the gamer, not any relationship to reality.  (Yes, I'm aware this argument is like the argument about whether movies about science and history should be accurate or at least flag their biases -- and given their influence I personally wish they did.)  I look forward to what the new Cities in Motion 2, expected soon, comes up with.

welcome, new zealand herald readers

If you've arrived from the link in today's article in the New Zealand Herald, welcome!  The best introduction to my own thinking on the Auckland network redesign, with remarkable maps, is here.  Meanwhile, the post below is a big-picture argument about the set of choices that the redesign proposes, and the relationships among them ...

"abundant access": a map of a community's transit choices, and a possible goal of transit

In my book Human Transit, I argued that the underlying geometry of transit requires communities to make a series of choices, each of which is a tradeoff between two things that are popular.  I argued that these hard choices are appropriate assignments for elected boards, because there is no technical ground for making one choice or the other.  What you choose should depend on what your community wants transit to do.  Examples of these choices include the following: 

• Ridership or Coverage?  Should transit agencies be maximizing their ridership, which is easily done by abandoning service to low-ridership areas, or should they spread out service throughout their service area so that everyone has some service, despite the predictably low ridership that results. (HT Chapter 10)
• Connections or Complexity?  If you try to design a transit network in which people won't have to transfer, you'll end up with a network with high complexity and low frequency.  I first explained this here, and later, and more rigorously, in HT Chapter 12.
• Peak-first or all day?  While it's widely assumed that transit is most productive during the peak, this is not always the case, because service running only on the peak, and especially only in one direction, can be massively expensive to operate.  Should the peak commuter be the primary focus of a transit network even given these costs, or should a transit agency seek to build an all-day network of services that encourages reliance on transit at all hours, while still meeting peak capacity needs?  (HT Chapter 6).
• How far do you assume people will walk?  Assuming higher walking distances allows transit lines and stops to be further apart, increasing both speed and frequency.  Research has found repeatedly that people will walk further to better service, though when you first propose to increase walking distance they will complain.  This is an especially tough tradeoff because frail seniors and disabled people are small in numbers but have a particular aversion to walking.  (HT Chapter 5).
• Should transit be protected from congestion?  Doing so, by giving transit a lane (or trackway) not shared with traffic will dramatically improve reliability and thus the degree to which people will find they can trust the service.  However, this requires a city to display a profound commitment to transit in the allocation of its streetspace.  (HT Chapter 8).

Note that while the framing of these choices tends to make them sound binary ("Ridership or coverage?") the choice is not between two boxes; it's of a position on the spectrum where the two terms define the extremes.  You don't have to choose between ridership or coverage, for example, but you have to choose a point on the spectrum between them, and you have to accept the mathematical fact that, as on any spectrum, moving toward one extreme implies moving away from the other.

In the Epilogue of HT I briefly introduced the idea that for each of these choices, one option seems to trigger a positive-feedback loop, while the other option does not.  Here is a new and expanded diagram of that idea.  Click to enlarge, or download here:    Download Abundant access diagram  (Tip: Print it on A3 or 11x17.  There's a lot here.)

What do I mean by positive feedback loop?  On each of these choices, the option that points toward the center leads to a particular kind of network that supports all of the goals implied by all the centerward choices.  For example, if you plan your network for maximum ridership rather than coverage, you also generate a network that encourages higher walking distances, that supports easy connections rather than complexity, and that tends to present the strongest case for facilities that protect transit from congestion.  

On the other hand, the options that point outward from the center tend not to support each other.   You can achieve the goal implied by these outer choices, but (arguably with some exceptions) each one will require a separate effort.  For example, if you believe walking distances to transit should be low, as seniors tend to advocate, then you need to put parallel transit routes -- and the stops on those routes -- very close together.  This does nothing to advance any of the outer "outward" goals, whether it be growing peak demand, or avoiding connections, or achieving a luxurious experience that will compete with a BMW.

Another way of saying this is that the choices that point inward all point to a single set of network design principles, and a single set of consistent priorities, while the choices pointing outward lead to many different kinds of network design and competing priorities.

What happens when you move toward the center?  These choices converge on a single, consistent goal that I propose to call Abundant access, which means:

The greatest possible number of jobs and other destinations are located within 30 minutes one way travel time of the greatest possible number of residents.  

[Why 30 minutes?  The question is tangential to my point, and other figures could be used, but if one has to pick a figure the most solid basis is Marchetti's constant [PDF], the idea that humans throughout history have tolerated about one hour of daily travel time.  Obviously, shorter or longer periods may apply to trips other than the commute.]

For any individual, abundance of access can be visualized using a map of isochrones, like the Mapnificent.com travel time maps, which show the area you can get to within a fixed amount of time on some combination of transit and walking.

 

Of course, any quantification of abundant access must consider not the area but the amount of stuff in it: jobs, retail, recreational opportunities, hospitals, all the things that form the universe of destinations.  As a matter of public policy, it must also maximize over the largest possible share of the population.  In the case of transit, the population over which abundant access is most cost-effectively maximized tends to be a more urban, high-density population, because among readily available measures, density is one that best predicts the intensity of ridership that will arise from a service investment.  (Fortunately, that's fairer to than it sounds, because people living at high densities use much less road infrastructure per capita than people living at lower densities.)

The goal of abundant access has several kinds of appeal.

First, it can be measured objectively without recourse to psychology or culture.  Ridership estimates are based heavily on travel times that approximate the notion of abundant access, but they also add psychological factors that are less stable, such as observed preferences for particular technologies.  These factors may be emotionally vivid, but like many emotional factors they are likely to change with time and especially with generations -- just as emotional attitudes toward cars are changing now.  Abundance access measures a fact that is entirely objective -- travel times.  Unlike emotional reactions to technologies, the value of access has been constant across millennia of human experience.  

Second, abundance of access is literally a quantification of freedom, in the sense that matters to us in transportation.  Isochrone maps like Mapnificent's, in particular, show us our freedom in a very immediate way: here is where you are free to go, now.  Abundant access measures the transportation element of opportunity of all kinds, which is one of the main reasons people have moved to cities since their invention.

The concept of freedom is sadly undervalued in much urbanist discourse, and I am always looking for ways to reintroduce it.  Much urbanist writing, for example, is blatantly prescriptive ("you should want this kind of community"), which feeds conservative stereotypes of urbanism as manipulative or coercive.  We need to be able to talk not just about ideal communities but about freedom and personal responsibility, a frame in which all the great urbanist ideas -- and all the urgent environmental imperatives -- can be stated equally well.  In that frame, the key idea is not "the good" but "choice," where freedom of choices also implies responsiblity for your choices.

So again, all of this work is descriptive, not prescriptive.  I'm not saying that you should like the goal of abundant access; that would be value judgment, and you get to make those for yourself.  

I am saying, though, that abundant access as an idea has certain features and consequences, including a tendency to be self-reinforcing.  As mapped along the various axes of choice, abundant access is a single consistent vision whereas the opposite choices lead to many unrelated visions.  

Still, you don't have to like it.  My role, as always, is to describe consequences clearly, and help people choose.