Human Transit

washington dc: new network maps, with frequency!

The Washington DC transit agency WMATA has now released drafts of its new network map, which highlight the frequent network very dramatically with wide red lines:

Finally, it's possible to quickly see where the next bus is coming soon, rather than getting lost in a confusing tangle in which all routes look equally important.  The map is by the excellent firm CHK America.  Get the full story, with many more samples, at Greater Greater Washington, and remember, if you like these, don't take it for granted.  Transit agencies need to hear positive feedback where it's deserved.

 

portland: the grid is 30 years old ... thank a planner!

Thirty years ago next week, on Labor Day Weekend 1982, the role of public transit in Portland was utterly transformed in ways that everyone today takes for granted.  It was an epic struggle, one worth remembering and honoring. 

I'm not talking about the MAX light rail (LRT) system, whose first line opened in 1986. I'm talking about the grid of frequent bus lines, without which MAX would have been inaccessible, and without which you would still be going into downtown Portland to travel between two points on the eastside.  (Full map here.)

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What did it look like before 1982?  Here's a bit of the 1970 network (full map here).

The 1970 network consisted of bus routes radiating from downtown across the gridded eastside, which constitutes about 3/4 of Portland.  If you were anywhere on this network, you had a direct bus downtown -- a slow, circuitous, and infrequent bus.  Very few routes ran better than every 30 minutes during the day.  Only two routes ran north-south across the east side, and both were too infrequent to transfer to, so you couldn't really use them unless both ends of your trip were on them. 

How did the 1982 network transform the possibilities of mobility in the city?  

• The old network was solely about going downtown.  The new network was about going anywhere you wanted to go.
• The old network was infrequent.  The new network required easy connections, so it was designed to run at high frequency (most lines every 15 minutes or better all day).  Remember: Frequency is freedom!
• The old network was wasteful, as many overlapping lines converged on downtown.  The new network was efficient, with little overlap between lines, and with lines spaced further apart to the extent that the street network allowed.  This is how the resources were found to increase frequency so much.
• The old network was complicated, with routes often zigzagging from one street to another.  The new network was simpler, easy to keep in your head.  Many streets that were formerly served by a patchwork of overlapping routes, such as Division, now had a single route from end to end, so that you needed only remember "the Division bus."  Transit became an intrinsic part of the street.

If you're in a hurry, skip to "Thank a Planner!" below.  But if you have a couple of minutes, let's explore more deeply how the grid transformed Portland, and why it was so controversial at the time.

In both maps above, that wavy line across the middle of eastside Portland is the Banfield Freeway, where the first and backbone line of the MAX light rail system runs today.  In the 1970 image, look for the line marked "1" extending north from the Banfield in the middle of the image.  This is NE 42nd Avenue (a bit of which is labeled 41st, but don't let that distract you).

In the old network the bus line along 42nd came from the north edge of the city, once an hour.  Partway down it merged with another branch, to form 30-minute frequency.  When it approached the Banfield, it turned west and zigzagged into the city via the Lloyd district.  Once it turned west off of 42nd, it was duplicating other routes the whole way.  If you wanted to go somewhere else on the eastside, the bus was not much use.   Frequencies were poor so it was very hard to make a trip involving multiple routes.

If you lived on NE 42nd in 1982, you were confronted with massive change, the sort of change that makes people scream.  Never again would you have a direct bus to downtown Portland.  Now you would be on the new 75, which would run continuously north-south all the way across the city.  And if you wanted to go downtown, you would have to transfer (as we called it in those days). 

But on the bright side, the 75 would run every 15 minutes, so transfering wasn't hard.  And in return, you got all the other benefits of a frequent routes that would let you connect quickly to reach destinations all over the east and north sides of the city, without going downtown.  

This is always a tough sell, because many people value transit only for the commute downtown.  These people tend to complain when the network is optmized to serve many kinds of trip at once, which is exactly what the grid does.  A frequent grid is the ultimate in versatility, equity and freedom.  It does not pick favored destinations for favored markets. Instead, it delivers anywhere-to-anywhere mobility for wherever you might want to go.  Today, the non-downtown elements of the grid, especially 72 and 75, are among TriMet's most productive lines.  

The grid redefined the role of transit in serving Portland's livability objectives.  When you think of everything that makes Portland both livable and culturally distinctive, you're probably thinking about the historically dense and gridded part of the city.  This is where almost every cool urbanist outcome of the last 30 years -- from food carts to bike lanes to office-over-retail -- has sprouted and thrived most successfully. Rail gets all the press, but the MAX light rail line would not have worked without this grid to connect with it.  (The reverse is not true: the grid worked well for four years before the MAX line opened, though MAX was certainly an improvement that achieved further ridership payoffs.) As Gregory Thompson and Jeffrey Brown put it in a recent paper :

If the 1983 and 1986 restructurings had not happened, LRT would have been a competitor with the CBD-focused, poor quality parallel bus routes that already were there, and there would have been no high quality bus routes intersecting the LRT at right angles. Portland would have enjoyed much less patronage than it has since experienced on both its LRT and bus routes.

Where did all the money for the new high-frequency crosstown lines come from?  Removing duplication. Look again at the your ride on 1970's route 1.  Once it turned west off of 42nd, it duplicated other routes the entire way into downtown.  Now look closely at the routes approaching downtown from further south in the old map.  They ran on so many closely-spaced parallel streets that they were effectively duplicating one another as well, wasting service.  The grid plan found many resources by removing these duplications and moving to wider and more consistent spacing of lines across the whole city.  In the same process,the grid introduced the idea that it's OK to walk further to a more frequent and useful service -- the foundation for transit's link with walking (and with all of walking's public health outcomes) today.

The grid was also a radical simplification, making it easier for people to keep the network map in their heads.  Now, bus lines would often follow the same street from end-to-end, so you could remember easily that there's a Division Street bus, say, and an 82nd Avenue bus.  In the old network, if you wanted to go from 20th & Division to 82nd & Division, you had to go downtown and back, because these two parts of Division were covered by different routes.  The beauty of the grid is that your transit directions are sometimes as simply as walking or driving directions:  "Take the Division bus out to 82nd, then take the 82nd bus south."  The transit lines are just part of the street.

Imagine, in 1982, the struggle involved in implementing this.  Vast numbers of people lost their direct bus to downtown, at a time when going downtown seemed like the only purpose of transit to many existing riders.  Transit agencies tend to listen most to their existing riders, who have adapted their lives to the system as it is, so it takes real courage for them to seek new markets instead of just catering to the existing ones.   Imagine the disruption, the rage, the recriminations, not to mention the apathy from people for whom buses just don't matter, no matter what they're achieving.

Thank a planner!

If you can imagine how hard this was, consider thanking the planners who took all this abuse and persisted in pushing the plan through, because they believed in everywhere-to-everywhere networks and knew this would work if it were tried.  I'm especially thinking of:

• Ken Zatarain, who was a TriMet service planner at the time and who now manages service planning at the agency.  Thank him at:  zataraik AT trimet DOT org .
• Thomas G. Matoff, the single most important mentor in my own transit career, and probably the critical player in pushing the grid through.  Tom, who was service planning manager and thus Ken's boss, was an eloquent, passionate and persistent advocate for the grid both inside and outside the agency.  He was the first person I've met, and one of the few I've known, who could convey how essential network design is to the life, joy, and prosperity of a city.  Tom went on to be General Manager of Sacramento Regional Transit and is now working on the Sonoma-Marin rail project in California.  Thank him at:  tmatoff AT sonomamarintrain DOT org .
• His boss, Bob Post, who was Director of Service Development and who saw this redesign as crucial to the success of the Banfield MAX line, which would come along four years later.  He's at URS: bob DOT post AT urs DOT com .

I'm dead serious:  If you value being able to get around Portland in all directions, thank them.  In other words, do one of these things:

• shoot emails of appreciation to the three emails above, copied to me (jarrett AT jarrettwalker DOT net), with "Thanks for the grid" in the subject line, or 
• leave a comment here, or 
• say something on Twitter with the hashtag #PDXGrid .  

You might also ask the two mayoral candidates about how important the frequent grid is to their vision of the city, and whether they think it should be enhanced.

Why does this matter?  Because even today, there's disagreement in Portland about important the frequent grid is, or even whether a complete everywhere-to-everywhere network (which requires high-frequency buses as well as rail) should be a priority at all.  Some view the grid as unimportant, for example, because they view bus service as unimportant.

Purists might argue that the grid never made it to its 30th birthday, but rather perished at 27 in 2009.  That was the year that TriMet cut all-day frequencies below the 15-minute threshhold that is widely accepted as the definition of "frequent enough that you can use it spontaneously, without building your life around the timetable."  Since the grid relies on easy connections to achieve its goal of easy anywhere-to-anywhere access, the 2009 cuts began to undermine the whole idea of the grid. TriMet avoided doing this in its first round of cutting after the crash, but felt it had no alternative in the second 2009 round.  

Will the grid ever be restored to its necessary frequency?  Will it ever be expanded and enriched (as regional land use planning generally assumes it must be) with even better frequencies?  Not everyone in Portland thinks this is a priority, so you might want to express your view.  

More on the history and spectacular outcomes of the grid if you click below.  But even if you don't click, thank a planner!

adelaide: a frequent network diagram, but only if you're going downtown

Monday (in Australia) I shared a new frequent network diagram for Sydney, done not by the government but by a community transport organisation.  In Adelaide, meanwhile, the governmetn released a new frequent network diagram in July.  Here it is.  (Original PDF here.)

Locals are discussing it here.

Adelaide is a very centralised city, but still, it's extraordinary to notice that you literally can't go anywhere at high frequency without going through the CBD.  Only the stations of the O-Bahn, where routes converge from several directions to flow into the O-Bahn busway, is there any opportunity to make a frequent connection without going downtown. 

Adelaide readers and citizens should think about the question: Do we really want it to be impossible to get around spontaneously -- i.e. without much waiting -- anywhere other than to and from the CBD? Since former Portland transit general manager Fred Hansen is now in Adelaide, I hope he is pitching the virtues of grid networks -- which Portland has had since 1982.  A full grid is probably not appropriate for Adelaide's geography and resources, but radial systems with grid elements -- which I've been designing for years -- could open up vast new all-day travel markets.  

sydney: a new frequent network diagram

As the state government that rules Sydney begins rethinking the public transport network, a new Frequent Network diagram has appeared just in time.  (For more examples of this blog's frequent network mapping campaign, see the Frequent Network category.)

Download the whole thing, which covers all of greater Sydney inside the national park ring, here.  If you work on transport in Sydney, or just want to understand how to get around spontaneously, print it and put it on your wall!  I believe this is the only diagram in existence that can help you find your way around Sydney via frequent services, or understand their current structure.  (Yes, a geographic version would be helpful; perhaps, inspired by this, somebody will draw one.)

Below is the portion covering inner-city Sydney.  That's the largest continuously dense area of the region, and the one you are most likely to know as a tourist.  The CBD and Harbour Bridge are at the northern edge of this diagram, the airport is in the south, and the beaches are in the east.

The artist is Kevin McClain, who has just moved to Seattle to join the Accessible Services section at King County Metro.  He tells me it's to be published on the Easy Transport website -- a North Shore organisation devoted mostly to special-needs services.  It's odd that such an organisation has produced the most useful diagram of Sydney for people who just want to get around all day without waiting long, but that's exactly what this is.  

The maps published by the bus operators -- download here -- emphasise the complexity of the network by making all the routes look equally important, thus concealing patterns of frequency that would show the customer where they can move freely and easily.  In this it's like most transit maps from before the advent of frequent network mapping.  (For many great examples of frequent network mpas, see my Frequent Networks category.)  The Government deserves credit for fostering the Metrobus product, which is meant to be the future frequent backbone of the network, but there are still many frequent corridors that don't carry the Metrobus logo and M-number, so a Metrobus map is not quite a frequent network map.  The branding of Sydney services is still a work in progress.

The map reveals many issues that are hidden on the current public maps (download here).  Those maps make all the routes look equally important and thus give the impression of intimidating complexity.  

Public transport in Sydney has historically functioned in modal silos, with rail, bus, and ferry planning largely unrelated to each other and sometimes even seeing each other as competitors.  That's meant to change under the new integrated transport authority, Transport for New South Wales, which has begun thinking about all the modes together.  I hope this diagram will help them visualise the problem and conceive new solutions to it.

If you care about people who move around all day, who are inclined not to drive, but who value their freedom and won't stand for being stranded for long stretches of time, this is your public transport network.  The gaps in this network are the gaps in people's freedom.  Can Sydney do better?

washington, dc: a subway-style frequent bus map

Dan Malouff at Greater Greater Washington has sketched a schematic (not geographic) Frequent Bus Network map for the city, and separate maps for each suburban county.  See the original to enlarge and sharpen.

Obviously I recommend Frequent Network maps that show all the modes that run frequently, in some legible way.  In this case that would include the subway.  Otherwise, you seem to imply that there is a huge audience of bus people who want to travel only by bus.  Of course, such a map would need to be at a much larger scale and would have required a lot more work (and tough design choices) to draw.  This bus network is obviously discontinuous because the missing links are in the rail system.

 

greater seattle: loving the new sub-network maps

Now this is a clear map!  It's by the Seattle area agency King County Metro.  First the legend:

RapidRIde is King County Metro's new rapid bus product, with widely spaced stops, high frequency, special stations, but usually no exclusive lane.  Note how cleanly this legend distinguishes services that are useful for different purposes.  Note too that it omits peak-only commuter express services, because if they were present they would be lots of confusing overlapping lines that would make the basic network impossible to see.

So here's a piece the map.  Click to enlarge, but more important, go here (that's an order) to see the whole thing.

The distinctions on this map are entirely about what matters to the customer, especially the person who wants to see the all-day transit network that is ready to liberate your life, not just your commute.  Red means fast and frequent.  Blue means frequent.  Green means all day but not frequent.  And if you want to see peak commuter express services, which would obliterate the legibility of this map if they were included, see another map or individual timetable.  

To be fair, many good maps do show peak only services and visually de-emphasise them as faint dashed lines.  That works too, but the key design principle is this:  The network of any particular layer in the hierarchy of service should be clear without being obscured by lower levels of service.  This map does that perfectly:  You can see just the red Rapid Ride line, or you can focus easily on red plus blue to see the frequent network, or you can notice the paler green and see the all-day network.  All in one map.

To get to this kind of customer-centered clarity, note what they had to omit:  Two transit agencies' services are presented here with no differentiation at all.  Bus routes numbered in the 500s belong to Sound Transit while the others belong to King County Metro.  Most multi-agency regions would focus on highlighting this distinction first, on the assumption that the customer's loyalty to a transit company is much more important than their desire to get where they're going.  The distinction should arguably be at least a footnote if you don't have integrated fares between the companies, as it could imply fare penalties and different fare media.

Some multi-agency maps do show all operators, but still visually distinguish them, as the Los Angeles Metro map does, for example.  But if you want a really simple map, reduce the transit company's identity to a footnote, or something that can be inferred from a route number*, or don't even show it at all.  Instead, show the customer what matters to them: frequency, speed, and duration of service.

*Can you spot the one place on the LAMetro map where they do that?  The answer is in "Joseph E"'s comment below.

 

guest post: a reader's struggle to map tel aviv's transit network

Alan Tanaman is a transit planning enthusiast who is working to help redefine the perception of public transport in Israel as a service to be used by everyone. Alan was an advisor on transport policy for the Israeli Labour Party during their 1998 election campaign, and more recently has been assisting the Israeli Public Transport Passengers Organisation (an NGO). He is also one of the moderators on the Tapuz Public Transport forum, but his primary interest is in trying to make transit more simple to understand and use.

This blog was the prime motivator for my attempt to produce a frequent-network map for the Tel Aviv Metropolitan region. The area lacks a rapid transit system, but the slack is generally taken up by a fairly frequent bus system, albeit lacking in priority measures. Although frequent, the network has grown sporadically and without method, and it was decided in 2004 that a complete overhaul of the network was needed, one that would be based on free transfers.

Only in July 2011 did the first major reorganisation phase take place, but it was shrouded in secrecy until about 10 days before the change. Once the change did take place, there was mass confusion. Suffice to say that the information was insufficient and the implementation was poor.

People resented having to make changes, but in this case the change was poorly explained; the benefits of the new system with high-frequency core sections were unclear. It is incredible that one of the missing pieces was a complete network map. The government website www.busline.co.il included only individual line maps along with maps of individual areas. But if you wanted to get from one end of the city to the other, it was pretty difficult to work out the best way to do so.

I wondered if some of Jarrett Walker’s principles would work – was there a clear network of high-frequency lines running all day? During that month, curiosity got the better of me, and I put together a map of the highest frequency routes. These were to be called ‘fork routes’: Routes with a high-frequency trunk, forking out into two or three branches at each end. I also added a few of the other high-frequency routes and published the map on a public transport forum. The reaction was very positive, but the network coverage was sparse, so I was urged to add lower frequency routes.

At this point I decided that the map was going to become a mission to produce a complete network map, excluding only the very lowest frequency routes. This seemed impossible – the network is so complex and there are far too many line numbers to fit. Worse still, the agency was now backtracking on some of the changes that had simplified the network, and had announced that it would bring back some cancelled routes, and revert some to their old meandering ways.

But by combining two bus mapping systems, often known as French and Classic, it could be done. The French system uses coloured lines for each route, whereas the Classic (or British) system marks route numbers along the streets. By using coloured lines for groups of high-frequency routes and marking the rest of the numbers along the streets in black, everything fitted in, and the high-frequency routes were still clear enough to follow. 

The first network map was released on 23rd August. You can see this archive map in Hebrew at http://telaviv.busmappa.com/p/blog-page_22.html.  Here is a slice:

Only a week later a bunch of (bad!) route changes took place, which led me to release a second map as soon as I could. This map included routes every 20 minutes or better (in black) and 15 minutes or better (in colour). Routes running every 10 minutes or better got thicker lines and solid coloured number discs.

For the final map, in English map see here:  Here is a slice of it.

In the final English version, I also decided to incorporate some high-frequency commuter lines, but only when they were similar to the coloured lines that were already on the map. For example, route 166, which branches off route 66 at its eastern end, and also runs slightly differently for a short portion within Tel Aviv. Unfortunately, this does have the effect of making the all-day frequent network rather less clear.

can "network primers" reduce grief about network design?

Greater Vancouver's transit agency TransLink has now published something called the Managing the Network Primer [Download PDF] and has a new webpage devoted to this and similar themes.  It's a simple explanation of why effective transit networks are designed a certain way.  It pushes back on the confused and confusing notion that "buses are flexible compared to rail," by emphasising the ways that all kinds of transit work or fail along the same geometric principles.  It can also be used to explain to a reasonable person why the bus can't just deviate to serve (or avoid) her house, business, or development project.  I'm honored to have made substantial contributions to it, in the context of my ongoing work with TransLink.

Subliminally present in this document -- and more explicit, I hope, in the next version -- is that this is also a primer for transit-oriented land use planning.  If you want good transit at your home or development or senior center or business park, you need to locate it where transit can be efficient, and therefore abundant.  So by understanding what efficient transit looks like, you can get a better grasp of what truly transit-oriented development looks like.

So like my book, and like my course, this document will be interesting for transit geeks but is really meant for people in land use planning, development, architecture, and other related fields.  These are the people who are deciding how effective transit can be in the future -- every bit as much as transit planners are.

Once again, TransLink is being careful not to tell any city what it should do with its land use.  Rather, this is part of a process of explaining the transit consequences of the choices a city might make. 

If your regional transit agency is giving its city governments the impression that it's telling them what to do, it may have something to learn from documents like this.  Getting this message right is something I've worked on for a while, and it was the subject of my recent keynote at the Canadian Urban Transit Association annual conference.   Let me know if I can help.

vancouver publishes frequent network map

The Wayfinding team at Vancouver's TransLink has finally unveiled their new network map, with Frequent Network designations.  In this case ... orange:

Download the whole thing here: regional transit map

The term "FTN" (Frequent Transit Network) also appears on the map here and there.  This term has already been used for several years in TransLink policymaking.  In fact, four years ago in Transport 2040 TransLink committed to this goal:

The majority of jobs and housing in the region are located along the Frequent Transit Network (frequent, reliable services on designated corridors throughout the day, every day).

Now, finally, the public can see it too!  Disclosure: I had a review-and-comment role in a few stages of this process, but it's definitely TransLink's work, led by their excellent Wayfinding team.

some questions on frequent network mapping

@CityBeautiful21 tweets this question about Frequent Network mapping (explained here, examples here and here):

@humantransit In a place that is improving its transit but cannot yet draw a [Frequent Service] map by your ["every 15 minutes all day, seven days a week"  requirements], how would you draw the map?

When a transit agency first sits down to do frequent network mapping, this always comes up.  Not all services are frequent over the same exact span.  Many are frequent all day but not evening or weekend.  This the the normal outcome of a history of route-by-route and hour-by-hour service analysis.

[A Frequent Network policy will gradually enhance those analysis methods by bringing your focus to (a) the entire independent network instead of each route individually and (b) the entirety of the day rather than each hour individually.  Hour-by-hour analysis of routes is especially misleading because ridership at each time of day depends on service availability another time of day; you won't use transit in either direction unless it's available in both directions at times you expect to travel, and if you're not sure when you come back, you care about the abundance and extent of the whole evening service pattern.  This is why cutting evening service -- which may have low ridership when analyzed trip by trip -- can damage a route's usefulness throughout the service day.]

Meanwhile, how to draw the map?

1.  Start where you are.  If your current frequent service offering is only weekdays all day, then say that.  The map will still be useful.  If you can come up with some kind of minimum evening/weekend service commitment for those route segments (every 30?) then say that as part of the definition of the frequent product.  Meanwhile, you can use your long range planning process to articulate the need for a more robust service span on the Frequent Network, over time.

2.  Consider the larger principle, which is this:  Service that is more likely to be useful to lots of people for lots of purposes, and that are designed to work together as a network, should be more visually prominent.  Service that is highly specialized to a limited market should be less visually prominent, including peak-only services and any service that runs less than once an hour (or even every 30).  It's these occasional service patterns that make transit maps unbearably complicated -- a problem easily fixed by ensuring that your map shows those ephemeral route segments but that they recede visually so that the more frequent network stands out.    

It never makes sense to draw a route that runs three times a day in the same line that you'd use for service every 30 minutes all day.  The problem of such maps is the same: you weaken the meaning of a line on the map by using that line to refer to something so ephemeral and specialized, thereby implying that any line on the map may be equally ephemeral and specialized.  So use a different, weaker line for those services.

For some good examples of maps showing all routes in a network, but using this principle that more frequent routes should stand out and less frequent routes should recede, see the full network maps for Portland and Spokane, discussed further in this post.  Here's a slice of Spokane's, where the red lines are frequent and the fainter pink lines are peak-only:

... and of Portland's, where a wider line is Frequent and peak-only lines are dashed with a white number bullet:

Full maps here:  Spokane.  Portland.

In both examples, more broadly useful services are more visually prominent.  Peak-only services recede (a thin pink line vs a wide red one in Spokane, a dashed line in Portland) so that you can see them but won't be distracted by them when you want to see the all-day network.  Both maps also highlight the Frequent Network in different ways.  Overall, I prefer the clarity of the Spokane map, because Portland introduces much complexity by trying to differentiate every route by color.  But both are good design responses to the basic problem, which is: Show me the services that are most likely to be useful!

More on this in Chapter 7 of my book.