Since I began offering my short course in network design, I've gotten many emails asking whether I'm going to do it again, and in what cities. The answer is that each session of the course needs a local sponsor, and as soon as I hear from one, I'm keen to help make it happen.
To help that process along, I now have a page advertising the course. Please mention it to any organizations that you think should offer it!
As WalkScore's fine transit travel time tool languishes in extended beta, the alternative, Mapnificent, is getting some mainstream blog attention.
I may still be alone in this, but I as I explored with WalkScore's Matt Lerner here, I believe this tool, whoever finally perfects it, has revolutionary potential. It can easily be converted into a two-digit transit score which, unlike the WalkScore Transit Score, actually describes people's ability to get places. But it's bigger potential is as an alternatives analysis tool. When you city is facing a series of possible alternative transit projects, what if every citizen could use a tool like Mapnificent to see the exactly impact of each alternative on their mobility, and that of people and destinations they care about.
A major problem in transit politics today is that negative impacts of a project are obvious but benefits are often described in terms of ridership and development outcomes -- things that don't matter to the selfish present-minded citizen. We will always have selfish present-minded citizens, and I'd rather work with them than complain about them. Until we help people see the way a proposed project will change their lives for the better, sensible transit projects will continue losing these debates.
In this post I invited readers to poke around in a fictional city that I'm developing for use in a transit planning course. The city is laid out in Excel to make its features easy to analyze. Students will work with a slightly more naturalistic map under a layer of acetate, and will draw lines on the map to attempt various types of transit networks that might address the city's needs. More on the project and its purpose here.
I received many excellent comments, which I've used to expand and enrich the city. The city now has more layers of detail that you might find it fun to explore and comment on.
You're welcome to poke around in the updated version and share your views on its realism. Download here:
Download Game Newport intro (.doc file)
Download Game data (.xls file)
Your comments are welcome, but before you comment, have a look at the previous post and its comments first, just to see what's been said! Also, the little illustration at left is just one of many layers; to see the whole thing, open the files above.
This course is going to be fun! I hope to be able to repeat it many times in many cities.
Games may soon be the best way to build understanding of city planning and transport. So argues an excellent article in Planning magazine by Jeff Ferzoco of New York's Regional Plan Association (my links):
At a recent talk at the American Museum of Natural History, Jane McGonigal, the Institute for the Future's director of Game Research and Design, noted that research from universities and the U.S. Army Mental Health Assessment Team show that the benefits of gaming lessen at about 21 hours in a week. ... Her point is that gaming has major benefits — stress relief, strategic thinking, goal attainment — if kept within the 21-hour limit.
She isn't the only one to see the implications. The Serious Games Initiative, founded in 2002 at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington, D.C., aims to "help usher in a new series of policy education, exploration, and management tools utilizing state of the artcomputer game designs, technologies, and development skills." One of its initiatives, Games for Change, runs an annual festival highlighting games — both electronic and physical — that encourage social change. Throughout the year, the initiative provides support for and development of new titles and helps potential developers navigate game making from concept to distribution.
There is already a lot of interest in how we can use games for teaching. Those who design virtualworlds put a lot of emphasis on crafting the experience — and allowing others to change it...
In my work as a graphic designer for Regional Plan Association in New York City, I constantly think through concepts, illustrations, and designs. Ideas don't just come from thin air, and everything I experience influences what I make. Looking back, I can clearly identify instances when city-building games influenced my design work. For instance, axonometric views: giant human hands placing houses on a row. These can be directly traced to a weekend I spent redesigning the suburbs of one of my virtual towns. And I'm not alone. Many of the people around me have taken their design problems to these samearenas and come out with a slightly wider and more empathetic perspective.
Playing a simulation game is a bit like gardening. Just as air, soil, and water interact with seeds to bring a plant to life, simulated ... cities can blossom and wilt, depending on your actions. You have to tend to the needs of the citizens, joining job centers and adding transit and roads to bring circulation to a dying center. It's instant, satisfying, and educational. In fact, it's why I work where I do in planning. I could say that my career began the moment I opened up SimCity for the first time.
Or if that's too many words, see Jane McGonigal's enjoyable video. Her basic thesis: "If we want to save the world, we need to spend more time playing computer games."
Did you draw maps of fictional cities when you were 8 years old? If so, you and I are part of a near-invisible, uncounted minority.
If that's you, I dare you not to be interested in this! Even if you just enjoy maps of other cities, here's a chance to study a city you've never seen before.
For the transit planning course that I'm developing, I've created a fictional city that's designed to present a range of major transit issues, while also being an interesting place. I considered using a real city, but in my experience, planning for a real city slides too quickly to details that obscure the big picture of how a good network works.
My introduction to the fictional city is here: Download Game Newport intro (.doc)
A rich set of map layers, created in Excel, is here: Download Game data backsave (.xls)
Both documents are covered by the assertion of copyright that covers all of this blog's material.
I'd love feedback, especially about these questions:
Have fun! The premiere of the transit planning course is in Surrey, British Columbia near Vancouver on June 9-10. Last I checked there were a few places left. Details here.
UPDATES:
Finally, I'm surprised at early comments that I don't have enough freeways! It's not a freeway dependent city, by choice. (See the .doc file above for more on the freeway wars.) But freeways that run only on the periphery and don't connect into the core are common enough in cities of this size class. See:
The last two of these are not, by any stretch, leftist car-hating enclaves. In fact, they're exceptionally car-dependent. Still, no freeways near the core. It's possible!
NOTE: The post discussed here is now open for registration! See here.
Simon Fraser University's City Program has approached me about teaching a short, intense, fun course on the concepts of transit planning, tying in with the book I'm working on. On completing the course, you'd have a mastery of the geometry and economics of transit sufficient to understand the real-world choices that transit requires communities to make, and some techniques for how planners and policymakers can get to consensus on those choices. As you'd expect from me, the course would be "mode-neutral," focused on the 90% of transit planning knowledge that is identical for buses, rail services, and ferries.
At least half of the course time would consist of a series of hands-on, small-group exercises where students design a network for a fictional city, experiencing the tradeoffs that arise when working with a limited budget. Vancouver's transit agency Translink already uses this method as a stakeholder outreach tool, so we already have some good facilitators around whom I would hope to engage as teaching assistants for this effort.
The course would run all-day on a Thursday and Friday, sometime in late April or May, probably at SFU's downtown Harbour Centre campus. The cost would be $250. Enrollment would be limited to around 30.
So now here's a test on reading directions carefully! Based just on the information I've given, what are the chances that you'd attend such a course, which means either you'd pay for it yourself or convince your employer/grandmother/etc to pay to send you? Again the commitment is $250 and two days.
If these chances are much above zero, please click the "Email me" button under my photo, and send me a quick email. In the subject line itself, please just write a percentage that is your estimate of how likely you'd be to enroll based on the information I've provided. So
I figure if I add up all the percentage estimates I get, that will be a decent low-end estimate of potential enrollment, at least for the purposes of deciding if the course is worthwhile.
Please forward a link to anyone else you know who might be interested, and invite them to respond likewise. Thanks!
If you're still too young to be a transit geek, you might enjoy this news, emailed by a frequent reader:
Lego has recently released an excellent new Public Transport set (see pictures attached), which my sons and I had lots of fun building and playing with this last weekend.
Urban public transport toys are not common, and they tend to be either caricatured buses and trains for younger infants or expensive, detailed models for adults. That's why I think this set for 6-12 year olds is remarkable for allowing children a more realistic, hands-on opportunity to play with transit vehicles, infrastructure and concepts, reflecting what they see on the streets in real life.
What is also remarkable about this set (besides the articulated low-floor tram and the bike rack at one of the stops), is the seriously cool and modern design of the vehicles and transit stops. I can't say if toys as attractive and interesting as these might dignify and elevate the perception of public transport in children's minds (they certainly do for me) but if nothing else, they would allow children at an impressionable age to engage and explore the idea of urban living with transit as a normal part of life, alongside the usual cars, trucks and fire engines.
Interesting. Certainly, a lot of our assumptions about the world are encoded through childhood play. It's a great way for one generation to embed its values in the next, for better or worse.
Ah, SimCity. ... As a youngster I spent many hours building fields of residential tract housing, industrial parks, huge blighted and substantially vacant commercial districts, mega-highways connecting them all, and Godzilla.
When I recently discovered that the original SimCity was released as open source, I had to download it and try it out. I knew that it was inaccurate, but it was nostalgia. Then I discovered exactly how inaccurate it was. "No mixed residential and commercial areas?!? WTF!" I did play it long enough to also notice that transportation was pretty much a capital expenditure with no operating costs. Sigh.
Yes, those are the two of the worst fallacies built into the original Sim City:
Robert Cervero: The Transit Metropolis: A Global Inquiry
A rigorous but readable study of the transit choices made by a range of cities around the world, and how these choices have shaped the city for better or worse.
Richard Gilbert and Anthony Perl: Transport Revolutions: Moving People and Freight Without Oil
James S. Russell: The Agile City: Building Well-being and Wealth in an Era of Climate Change
David Sucher: City Comforts: How to Build an Urban Village, Revised Edition
Engaging book on the details of creating welcoming urban space.
Allan B. Jacobs: Great Streets
The definitive book on the ingredients of a great urban streetscape.
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