Human Transit

tweet of the month: must lose martini

 

When I read Jarrett Walker I feel like there is always just a light breeze and he is explaining it all with a martini in his hand. — Trip Planner Mag (@TripPlannerMag) May 15, 2013

 

Personally I've never gotten martinis. I'd rather people visualized a handmade ceramic mug of black coffee, or maybe chai.  What in my writing style do I need to change to update this impression?

UPDATE:  Yes I know it's a compliment, because James Bond drank martinis, while lots of cranks drink coffee.   But if I had the necessary refinement to be a connoisseur of all the ingredients of a martini, I wonder I'd have room in my head for transit planning, languages, urbanism, natural history, philosophy, coffee, gardening and all the other things that seem more important ...

In any case, if you need to visualize me with a martini, please go right ahead.  Perhaps I'll do a very posed photo with one sometime.  

guest post: solving the mystery of portland's missing 'faire'

Evan Landman is the new fulltime associate at my firm, Jarrett Walker & Associates.  He holds a BA in Human Geography from University of British Columbia and was formerly a planning intern for the Portland area regional government, Metro.  He tweets on transit and other Portland topics at @evanlandman. 

On a recent weekend, I had the opportunity to participate in a transit scavenger hunt and race hosted by Portland Afoot, a low-car lifestyle citizen journalism outfit. Players traversed the city using TriMet to solve the mystery of "Who Whacked Ms. Faire LeSquare?", a pun on the free fare zone that until September 2012 covered Portland's downtown core and a portion of its inner eastside.  

The crowd prior to the start of the race.

The event kicked off at Velocult, a bike shop and bar in Portland's Hollywood neighborhoood, near to a transit center and light rail station. Around 60 teams of 3-5 players took part; by my estimate, something like 250 people came out to spend one of the nicest days of the year so far riding transit. At times, it felt like everyone in town who writes, blogs or tweets on transit or mobility had turned up to play. One group even had members who came down on the train from Seattle to participate!

In addition to solving the murder mystery, each team could score points by visiting distant transit centers, using different modes to travel, riding multiple transit lines, spotting public art, or meeting TriMet employees. Amusingly, there were also points available for anyone who was able to get a photo of themselves being grilled by a fare inspector. The entire game was smoothly run through the clever use of unique Twitter hashtags to track everyone's progress.

I found out about the game the day before, so I didn't have time to register a team, but some folks short a player were kind enough to let me tag along. We used light rail, a number of bus lines, the Portland Streetcar, our feet, and a dragonboat to visit destinations across the Metro area, from the eastern transit center at Parkrose to the far western suburb of Hillsboro. Portland Afoot stationed volunteer actors (including one member of the city council) at different points around town to continue the story, and to provide clues and directions.

At the end of the day, the entire contingent met back at Velocult, where it was revealed that LeSquare had skipped town to Calgary (which has retained its downtown free fare zone). The organizers lined up several generous prize packages for the top three finishers, with freebies from Car2Go, Zipcar, and a long list of local retailers and restaurants. Best of all, one lucky finisher won a free one-year TriMet pass! 

In the spirit of play, Portland Afoot brought hundreds of people onto Portland's transit system for trips very different than the home-work commute. This sort of event serves as a wonderful tool to get people to use transit in an unfamiliar way, and shows that riding the bus or light rail can be both functional and fun. If I can use transit to have fun on a sunny Saturday, maybe I can start to imagine other new ways I could be using the system? If nothing else, this serves as a reminder that people in Portland, including young, politically engaged people, can still get excited about TriMet despite its recent cutbacks and continual pillorying in the media. 

 

JW postscript: I recall playing a similar game in around 1978, with a team including David Bragdon -- later the elected CEO of Portland's regional government.  Just imagine how much more fun Evan would have had without a phone, computer, or realtime information, on an infrequent, confusing transit network that only went downtown!

in the pacific northwest, the romantic drama is on the bus ...

This really is too much fun.  From a scholarly study of the Craiglist "Missed Connections" section, where people express a romantic interest in someone that they saw out in the world.  You know, ads like this:

We were both on the max [light rail]--me heading to the Blazer's game and you on your bike. You overheard part of my conversation with my friend and were quite amused. I wanted to talk to you but then got pushed back by other riders. Email me if you remember that conversation and would like to grab a drink sometime.

So here, by state, is the location most often cited in "Missed Connections" ads (click to sharpen):

In rail-rich older urban areas, it's rail transit, of course, the subway or train or metro.  But in relatively rail-poor parts of the country, only Oregon and Washington find so much wistful romantic drama on public transit!  This is one of those slightly twisted points of "Portlandia"-style pride that makes me proud to be an Oregonian transit planner.  

the unsustainability of "sustainability"

From xkcd:

Note that the Y-axis is a log-scale, so this is not really a straight line.  As longtime readers know, I prefer durable.  

 

 

when the bus doesn't come and you want to scream

Some bus shelters in Italy have supplies for this purpose.  

This is not just a quick laugh; there's an important insight here about how customers perceive time.  But no, I don't think it's a reason to tolerate lower frequencies ...

more disneyland transit ...

Wouldn't your life be better if you commuted every day by roller coaster?  From the technophile annals of New Scientist:

The Eco-Ride train feels like a ride on a roller coaster - and that's pretty much what it is. In a few years' time, this cheap and energy-efficient train could be ferrying passengers around areas of Japan devastated by last year's tsunami.

Developed at Tokyo University's Institute of Industrial Science (IIS), with the help of amusement ride firm Senyo Kogyo, Eco-Ride works in the exactly the same way as a theme park roller coaster. By turning potential energy into kinetic energy, it coasts along its tubular tracks without an engine. The train's speed is controlled by aerodynamics and by "vertical curves", sections of track that form the transition between two sloping segments. The Eco-Ride is set in motion and slowed at stations via rotating wheels between the rails that catch a fin underneath the train.

"Speed controlled by aerodynamics" ... "vertical curves" ... Sounds like the perfect commute experience after a long day's work when all you really want to do is see your partner/children/dog/bed/dinner.  And imagine all the work you'll get done on your laptop!  Will they serve coffee on-board?

And this:

The idea is that Eco-Ride will use its own inertia to get up most slopes but may on occasion need to be winched up steeper inclines.

Yes, after several paragraphs promising the ancient ideal of perpetual motion, we finally get an acknowledgment of friction.  Physics can be such a downer.

Like many technologies, this one may have some relevance, but the article is a technophile fantasy that seeks to excite us into to the point that we treat the technology's limitations as features.  Stops would be "just 100m apart" and the route is "ideally circular" -- both indicators of a slow and indirect transit service that's likely to have usefulness problems.  

Obviously I'm having fun here, not so much with the technology as with the New Scientist article.   This is yet another great example of "amusement park technophilia."  If you haven't thought about whether amusement park rides are good sources for transit ideas, well, my grand debate with Darrin Nordahl on this topic started here ... and went on here ...

 

hope this saves lives, because it's messing with my head

If after watching this you really want the iTunes track, then you are truly a masochist.  Here's the now-viral Metro Trains Melbourne rail safety video "Dumb Ways to Die," with infernal-tune-that-you'll-never-ever-get-out-of-your-head by Tangerine Kitty.

You were warned.

that danish bus commercial making the rounds

Buzzfeed calls it "the sexiest, coolest, most EPIC bus commercial ever," and adds: "If you don't like this, you don't like anything."  The commercial for Danish bus company Midttrafik brings all the cinematic cliches of our historical moment to bear on the problem of making the bus sexy.  If you're not fluent in Danish, hit the CC button at the bottom for English subtitles:

Over the top?  It may seem like a parody of a bus commercial, but it's at least as effective as a parody of contemporary cinematography.

where was this picture taken?

Once again, Andrew Sullivan's View from Your Window contest has a transit theme, but this one looks pretty difficult:

Are you an expert on tropical developing-world bus facilities?  If so, take your best guess here, right down to identifying the address of the photo source and the window it was taken from, if you can.  

ever wanted to be that sexy voice on the train?

I certainly did, maybe still do.  Last week, the Washington Post's "Dr Gridlock" asked readers to call in to record their rendering of the following sentence:

“Next station L’Enfant Plaza. Transfer to the Orange and Blue lines. Doors open on the right.”

An odd choice for an audition text, since it raises all these American anxieties about Frenchness, manifested in the endless question of how frenchly to pronounce French names ...