Human Transit

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!

guest post: nate wessel on why google transit will never be enough for small to medium-sized systems

Nate Wessel lives in Cincinnati, Ohio where for the last few years he's been working to improve public understanding of the local transit system. In 2011 he designed and published his own map of the system  and he now writes the Cincinnati Transit Blog. Nate has a degree in urban planning from the University of Cincinnati from where he graduated this past June.

 

I've heard quite a few times that Google Transit and similar technologies have made hand-rendered transit maps outdated. Being myself a maker of hand-made, tangible maps and having spent the last couple of years physically working with a lot of maps, I find myself with a bit of a gut reaction to this common claim.  It's more than just a reaction to an existential threat though. My reaction is to an idea that would toss the baby out with the bathwater. Not only are lovingly created, tangible transit maps incredibly valuable to our understanding of the cities we live in, they're essential to the widespread use of transit. We'll need to go back to basics.

What do maps do? What are maps? Why are they?

Maps are like Cliffs-Notes for the physical world. We don't have time to read the whole book but we still need to get an idea what it's about before the test. You'll probably never manage to explore the entirety of one mid-size city let alone a country or the whole world. Yet we still want to see what's out there, where we could go if we wanted to and what we'd find when we got there. Understanding the shape and nature of the whole world or even one city through direct physical experience is a practical impossibility.

We all need an understanding of the world beyond our fingertips; that's absolutely essential to modern human existence. It's why we have novels, to pick one example. A story from another life lets us share an experience we haven't yet had and perhaps never will. It lets us plumb the depths (and heights) of our own emotions and thoughts by momentarily opening ourselves up to the author's. We don't necessarily have to go there ourselves to learn something of love or sorrow(or downtown). Our innate curiosity pulls us to see what's possible in the world and within ourselves.

The same goes for everything on TV, in print, and many things on the internet. Most media lets us reach beyond our own personal experience to learn something of the world we can't see directly. We absolutely need these things. They give us an understanding of the broader world and let us contextualize our own existence. They show us what's normal, and more importantly what's possible for ourselves; where we can go and what we can do. Kids can't dream of being astronauts if they've never heard of one. We can't speak seriously of knights in shining armour and chivalry and honor and of other deeply interesting ideas until we've read of their existence and felt something of it ourselves. In exactly the same way maps show us what's possible in the physical world. They tell us that Spain is a place in Europe, that Queens is connected to Manhattan by subways and bridges, and that it's not similarly connected to Britain. We can't think of taking transit until we know what transit does and doesn't.

The other critical thing maps (and some other media)do is provide us with answers to specific questions. These might be:

• "Which line can I take to Queens?"
• "Are there coffee shops within walking distance of my current location?"
• "Exactly how much will the bus cost?"

Filling this need for specific information is in part why the encyclopedia was so revolutionary during the Renaissance and why the internet can be so powerful today. The amount of precise information available to people is just exploding. The age of science and empiricism has given us the idea of bulk 'information' as something that can succinctly and precisely answer an isolated question. "Where is the nearest bike shop?" We now keep stock of them in a Google database that can return the answer in milliseconds. Often you can ask the most esoteric questions of the Internet and find a succinct and satisfying answer in less than a minute. That's stupendously useful for travellers and college students with deadlines.

So maps (and other media generally) have two big functions: First to inform broadly and second to answer specifically. The informative function must necessarily precede the precise answering function. We need to know what's generally possible before we can know what exactly to ask. We need to know that transit is even an option before we can ask how exactly to use it.

Answering specific questions with specific answers is what Google Transit does well. Here's how it works:

• You tell Google Transit your location and exactly where you want to go.
• You tell it when you want to go there(usually now).
• It decides exactly the fastest way to do it, with perhaps a second option if it's a close call.
• It puts this exact path on a map and narrates directions like "turn left" or "wait here".

In many circumstances, this is quite useful. Many people, if they're taking a one-time trip to somewhere they don't normally go, will just want a quick answer; if the trip is possible, a computerized map can tell them exactly how to get there and exactly how to get back. That's often a very handy thing.

But Google Transit totally misses the first function of maps: informing us about the world, sating our curiosity, and showing us the possible. Google transit doesn't tell us anything about where transit goes generally. It makes us ask questions like "how do I get from exactly  here to exactly there right now?"

Without a basic understanding of what's possible it's left to hope that "here" is a decent place to start and that "there" is even a realistic possibility. Downtown Cincinnati for example has transit operating on just about every street, but you can't even spot it in the Google Transit interface before inquiring about a specific trip.

When we ask questions without knowing that a reasonable answer even exists, we're sometimes confronted with answers like "no results" or "there's one trip three days from now at 3:29am". Without a broader understanding of how the whole thing works, we don't know what to ask or if the answer we got doesn't sound right. Worse, when we get these disappointing answers to the wrong questions, we get confused and frustrated. Transit users need more guidance than "not possible" or "how about Tuesday?"give us. Also, some specific answers that serve us well for the moment will be misleading in the future. Here for example...

...Google Transit suggests we take the #19 northward, but says nothing of the invisible #17 that runs parallel to it at more than twice the frequency. You can easily imagine someone who's once looked up their route on Google Transit regularly letting a #17 pass by while they wait for a #19 and complain about headways. Similar situations must happen a thousand times a day.

Exploring a transit system with Google Transit is like blind men trying to understand an elephant by touch. This part is thick, this part is bumpy, we don't know how any of the parts attach to each other, and the whole thing is constantly, inexplicably moving. A thoughtfully hand-rendered transit map tells us what the elephant really is. It doesn't go into detail about the dimensions of it's toenails, but tells us of it's overall size, shape and temperament. It tells us that you might be able to ride the thing and that you probably don't want to try poking it with a sharp stick. Once we know these basics we can begin to ask exactly what the trunk is for.

That's why hand-rendered system maps continue to be completely relevant in the heyday of the computer. A map like that of DC's Metro tells us more about the city and how to use the transit system than any GTFS feed ever could on it's own.

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A hand-rendered map must necessarily simplify a system, showing only some lines and only some landmarks. To do so it makes value judgements, something a computer has never yet been capable of. It does most of the hard work of understanding for us because a map-maker must understand the transit system before he can make a map of it; it's not just a matter of dumping all the routes into a GIS program. That deeper understanding of the transit system is an experience most people don't yet have and it's exactly what they're looking for when they explore a system map. Similarly, when they explore a novel they may be looking for a deeper understanding of the human condition, history, or their own lives. In either case, they're most essentially looking for their possibilities. "What is there?" "What is within my reach?" What is possible for me?

It seems like most big American cities put these questions, at least so far as transit is concerned, largely to rest decades ago with their famous metro maps but that many small and mid-sized cities, particularly those that primarily use buses, provide little if any coherent, holistic map of how their system operates. They often seem content with either no system maps at all or only topographically accurate maps that de-emphasise and confuse the areas that can benefit from transit the most: those that are dense and well served by multiple lines.

Dense areas by definition get less space than their human value warrants on a topographically accurate map. Every famous transit map, whether it's DC's or New York's or London's does just the opposite; exploding dense, important areas like Downtown Manhattan and condensing suburban service. They do this not only because that makes them easier to draw, but because that emphasis on the dense is typically the actual emphasis of the transit system itself. A map that embodies the logic of a transit system is one that tells us most truly how the system works and most basically what we can do with it. We need something of that understanding before Google Transit can work well. We need to know what the elephant is.

But that deep understanding of a transit system and of a city is so different for each system that no computer program could ever yet describe every system well.  Google maps can't yet do it. It's something that just can't be automated.

Google Transit can give us the answers but it can't give us the questions. And that's why it will never be enough for a transit agency to publish schedules to Google Transit without also publishing a substantial and thoughtfully developed system map made by people who are more than passingly familiar with the transit system and with the city.

 

 

 

the price is right: market-based parking comes to new zealand (guest post)

This guest post is by my friend and colleague Stuart Donovan, with whom I've worked on a range of excellent transit planning projects over the years.  Stuart is the head of the New Zealand office of MRCagney consultants, a credentialed engineer, and the manager of numerous successful transit and transport policy research projects around New Zealand and beyond.
 

For me parking is like sex, money, and religion – it’s one of those things you avoid bringing up in polite conversation. The reason is that most cities have an over-supply of under-priced parking, yet most inhabitants of those cities believe exactly the opposite; that there is never enough parking.

Changing this belief is tough work. A large part of it seems to reflect a common assumption that even as cities grow they will be able to continue to provide similar levels of parking as they have had in the past. Deeper analysis suggests this assumption is invalid.

It’s invalid because economic and geometric realities prevent cities from expanding their parking at the same rate as they grow. In terms of off-street parking, higher land values tend to squeeze out space-intensive activities. In terms of on-street parking, limited kerb space and a range of competing uses, such as bus stops, constrains the degree to which more on-street parking can be provided.

For these two reasons, the supply of off- and on-street parking will always struggle to keep pace with the rate that cities grow. And of course combining constrained supply with growing demand will almost inexorably lead to higher prices. This economic relationship is the main reason why larger cities tend to command higher parking prices, other factors remaining equal.

During the 1950s many cities tried to subvert this economic equation. They implemented regulations that required new developments to provide large amounts of off-street parking. But minimum parking requirements simply meant that the cost of parking was paid for by developers, instead of users. The cost of parking was quite simply subsumed elsewhere in the economy.

Minimum parking requirements had a number of unintended impacts. Their primary impact was to create an over-supply of parking and lower the direct cost of parking for drivers. In this way, minimum parking requirements actually made a difficult problem even more challenging, because – over several decades – they have reinforced people’s cultural expectation for cheap parking.

Transport planners recognise that parking is a key influence on the travel decisions that people make. Aside from access to a vehicle, the price and availability of parking is probably the single most important determinant of whether people choose to drive.

So people who are passionate advocates for more efficient passenger transit, such as most readers of this blog, should also be passionate about addressing our parking issues. It’s hard to avoid the fact that abundant parking and efficient passenger transit are mutually exclusive outcomes.

But what can we do to address parking issues?

The solution to off-street parking supply seems quite clear: Cities should remove minimum parking requirements and allow developers to determine how much off-street parking they need for their development. This will usually be less than what minimum parking requirements currently stipulate.

Progress towards the removal of minimum parking requirements has already occurred in a number of cities around the world. My home city of Auckland, New Zealand (population circa 1.5 million) removed minimum parking requirements in the city centre in 1996 and has not looked back: More people now use passenger transit to access the city centre in peak hour than use private vehicles.

Fewer cities have made progress, however, with the way they manage on-street parking. Most still rely on time-limits (e.g. one hour) overlaid with paid parking. The combination of time-limits and paid parking creates an inconvenient situation, e.g. when your visit to the dentist takes 2 hours instead of 45 minutes you may return to your car to find that in addition to having holes where you wisdom teeth used to be your wallet has been further emptied by a parking infringement.

Reforming on-street parking policies often become bogged down in comments from residents and businesses about parking being “too expensive.” And when confronted with such questions many parking reform proposals die an unnatural death. But most discussions of cost focus only on the hourly rate, rather than the cost of infringements. I would argue that the latter needs to be included in discussions of cost, because it drastically changes the nature of the conversation.

Until recently San Francisco was the only city that had really forged ahead with major on-street parking reforms, under the measured encouragement of Donald Shoup and aided by a federal transport research grant. San Francisco’s approach to on-street parking reforms is brilliant in its simplicity: They recognised that time-limits were a relatively inefficient way of managing demand, especially in areas where pay parking also applied.

In most locations with pay parking, San Francisco has sought to remove time-limits. In these areas they now rely almost solely on prices to manage demand: If demand goes up then hourly rates also go up, and vice versa. If you’re interested you can (and should!) read more about San Francisco’s trail-blazing approach to on-street parking policy on the SFpark website. The most interesting result is that revenue from meters went up, but revenue from infringements went down.

So San Francisco had effectively substituted meter revenue for infringement revenue; and while many people hate paying for parking, in my experience they have an even deeper hatred towards parking tickets, primarily because it makes them feel “unlucky”. Until recently SFpark was a lone super nova in an otherwise cold and dark parking universe.

Until yesterday when my home city of Auckland, New Zealand announced that it was applying to join San Francisco’s elite parking club. Auckland has followed a similar line to San Francisco, by removing all time-limits from on-street car-parks the city centre and instead relying on prices to manage demand. They point to the following advantages of this approach:

• Easier to understand – so long as you’re paid up you’re good to go. No need to search for a car-park that allows you to park for as long as you need.
• Simpler to enforce – parking wardens only have to check that the ticket is valid, which greatly expedites the enforcement process.
• Reduced street clutter – a consistent approach to on-street parking means that only a few “Pay and display” signs are required, rather than a forest of confusing restrictions.

One of Auckland’s interesting tweaks is the implementation of a free 15 minute grace period, which is intended to replace the need for so many dedicated taxi and loading zones (drop off/pick up). Basically, with this grace period every space in the city becomes a potential drop off / pick up space, so long as you don’t park for longer than 15 minutes, which results in more efficient utilisation.

Overall, Auckland expects that the changes will be broadly revenue neutral. But this hides a very significant shift in where revenue comes from. Whereas in the current situation a large proportion of revenue is derived from those unlucky people visiting the dentist (i.e. through infringements), in the future revenue from parking infringements is expect to decline, whereas meter revenue increases.

One of the less obvious benefits of the approach taken by Auckland and San Francisco, however, is that they’ve set out an agreed policy process for setting parking prices. That is, they have developed a transparent formula through which parking prices are adjusted in response to demand. This greatly reduces opportunities for public/political interference in the setting of parking prices.

It’s now not so easy for individual residents or businesses to demand lower prices on their particular street, because the prices are determined by the policy. While people can seek to change the policy itself (indeed that is their democratic right) in doing so they are at least required to engage with broader questions such as: How would this impact parking across the entire city centre?

The most telling sign of the broad-based stakeholder support for Auckland’s proposed changes is the comes from the Chief Executive of Heart of the City (business association) Alex Swney, who said:

“For many years parking has been seen as a major reason not to come into the city. We see today’s announcement as a significant change in approach to parking in the city.  It recognises the ‘moving feast’ of parking demands of our businesses and their customers. It’s a major step forward and we are sure we will be looking back in a year and see significant improvement as a result.”

As one of the people that contributed to the development of this policy I’m quite biased in its favour. I can’t help but sense that this represents a big step in the direction of more transparent and sustainable on-street parking policy in Auckland.

As someone who regularly visits cities overseas it also makes me ask: Which city will be next?

using dynamite for lack of paint: alex broner on "cities in motion"

Ever since I posted on SimCity and SimCity 4 people have been telling me I must try Cities in Motion.  But when you have two jobs and you're already devoting hours to a blog and a book and a remodel, there is only so much time for computer games.  Fortunately, Alex Broner has boldly gone there in a guest post, so I don't have to!

 

In Cities in Motion (a game by Colossal Order, published by Paradox Interactive), one assumes the role of a CEO of a transit company tasked with providing transit to a particular city. In the campaign mode the cities are all based on specific cities at specific historical periods, Berlin during the cold war for example. There is also a “sandbox” mode in which you can play additional cities including player created cities and fictional cities.

Your transit company operates without subsidies for the most part, though there are “missions” which often offer monetary rewards for their completion. The most common mission is to connect two or more places together with a transit line.

In the campaign mode there are certain required missions which you must complete in order to “win” the scenario and unlock further scenarios.

Your transit company has a variety of different vehicle types which it can use to meet the needs of the city’s residents: Buses, trams, Metro, waterbuses, and helecopters.  There is (premium) downloadable content that adds electric trolleybuses, cable cars, and monorails.

Your success of failure in the game depends on finding ways to efficiently provide service connecting residents with destinations such as workplaces, shopping, leisure, and government. “Leisure” seems to include regional transportation hubs such as inter-city rail stations and airports. Like a real transit company, you must consider expenses for capital improvements such as stations and vehicles and also operational expenses such as labor and fuel/electricity.

This is not a city building game but the connection between density and transit service is made clear by the simple fact that even though you can build a subway to rural or suburban area, very few people will ride it.  The connection between service levels, frequency, and customer satisfaction is made clear by the “wait time” indicator. If the wait time on your transit lines is too long then customers will grow dissatisfied and eventually leave the station. Also, since all infrastructure such as stations and rails has maintenance cost, creating under-utilized infrastructure leads to a poor cost-revenue ratio.

To be successful your agency must take into account the layout of the city and where different groups of people want to go: working class people work at working class jobs, students go to the university, professionals to the offices, and so on. Then you must make choices between vehicle types and network arrangements and put it all together into a profitable enterprise.

All of this is pretty realistic but as I played I immediately began noticing some major problems. The most notable problem is that the “walk shed” for each stop or station is different for each type of vehicle. The game will have residents walk much farther for metro service than they will for buses or trams, no matter how poor the metro service is or how good the buses and trams.

An additional problem is that there is nothing like transit lanes or transit signal priority for buses and trams. The streets of Cities in Motion have various amounts of traffic and in heavy traffic your vehicles will bunch up, depriving you of much needed revenue and making your riders unhappy. One's tools for dealing with this are limited: trams can run on unoccupied ground such as across plazas or on grass. Often in the game I find myself building a tram because there’s a long park or other way to bypass congestion. One can demolish buildings that get in the way of your trams but not build roads or even transit lanes, placing one in the bizarre situation of reaching for the dynamite for lack of paint. In combination the limited walk shed and lack of prioritization tools such as transit lanes means that the game very quickly becomes about building Metro systems. Not only is this unrealistic it’s also quite boring.

Additional annoying features:

• Cyclical economic changes causes one to have to adjust ticket prices and labor pay rates constantly for each type of vehicle and 5 types of employees. There’s a mod that allows one to do this automatically but it would have been nice if that had been included in the base game.
• Residents are drawn to transit in an almost fanatical fashion, they will navigate around any barrier to reach a station that’s close enough by straight line distance. One is not encouraged to situate stations in places realistically accessible. The routing algorithm of residents is poor meaning that they’ll pile up on the platform of one metro station even if there’s an empty platform with comparable services right nearby. 
• Metro trains try to get 100% full before departing, even if this means holding up the empty train behind them. 
• Finally, one is unable to combine either metro or tram vehicles to form longer trains (or construct longer platforms).

On the whole I give the game a B- for gameplay and a C for simulation value. It obsesses over certain aspects of transit (different types of customers, different types of workers, etc) while failing to address some really important ones. It teaches some important things about transit (frequency, density, operation costs) while furthering our confusion about the relationship between technology and levels of service. I would love for the makers of the game to fix some of these problems either through downloadable content or a new release. We need clearer thinking when it comes to transit and while this game doesn’t quite provide it, it very easily could.

[Alex Broner is a graduate student working on his Masters of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Hawaii with an expected graduation date of December 2012. He is also an intern writer/researcher for the Sightline Institute.  His professional interests are in transportation, landuse, and urban design. Alex is passionate about creating enjoyable urban places where it is easy and safe to walk, bicycle, and take transit. His personal interests include cycling, science fiction novels, computer games, and dodgeball.]

social media's influence on public transit (guest post)

Guest Post by Daniela Baker

Daniela Baker is a social media advocate at CreditDonkey where she helps entrepreneurs find small business credit cards.  She grew up in Europe where public transportation plays a huge role in everybody's life.  Public transit "consumers" like Daniela are finding their voice and publishing it on the web for all to read. With that newfound confidence, they are discussing political issues, gaining support for changes to be made when it comes to public funding and increased public transit choices.

With more and more people on the road and gas prices on the rise, Americans are looking for a better alternative to commuting by car. Unfortunately, many transit systems can be hard for the newbie to decipher, or fall short in offering what citizens are after. Even more unfortunate, many people are unaware of the options their towns offer when it comes to transportation.

When consumers aren’t finding what they’re looking for when it comes to public transportation, they are turning to social media to help garner the influence they need to get the services they’re after. This has left many professionals scratching their heads, uncertain how social media can influence a public service.

Here are some answers as to why consumers are turning to social media when it comes to public transportation, as well as how consumers and cities are driving the social media efforts.

Americans’ sentiments toward public transportation

A poll released in March 2010 by Smart Growth America and Transportation for America found that Americans are craving more transportation options. The poll indicated that Americans would be open to doubling the amount of funding that is currently being funneled toward public transportation.

The poll found that Americans are frustrated with the transportation options that are currently available. In fact, 73 percent of respondents stated they have no options other than driving as much as they currently do. In the study, only 1 in 5 of those polled took public transportation during the previous month (this included walking) but indicated they would like to use it more; about 47 percent indicated public transportation is not an option in their area and 35 percent said the timing of routes did not work with their schedule.

These survey results were not only for metro areas but applied to suburban and rural areas as well, with respondents stating that rural areas would also benefit from increased transportation systems. In fact, 79 percent stated that in rural areas the U.S. would benefit from expansion and improvements made to both bus and rail systems. Eighty-two percent of suburbanites shared the same sentiment.

Why social media

In the past, when a consumer was looking for information, they would go to the local library to research an issue or visit town hall for information on public services. If they were unhappy about the services provided or felt that there was a need that was being missed, they would meet with their elected official.

Nowadays, citizens are going straight to the Internet to get answers and try to make change. With social media like blogs, Twitter and Facebook, and websites created by the common consumer, people are making real connections with people who they have never met in person.

Nielsen Research wanted to see just how large of an influence social media has on today’s consumers. This question was answered with a study they conducted in 2007. When asked what sources they trust, chat/discussion comments and blogs ranked two and three on the list, just behind other consumers. Other choices included brand websites, TV/magazines, radio, sponsorships, search ads and banner ads.

Citizens making public transportation more convenient

Tech savvy individuals have started to take action by creating social media outlets that help fellow commuters find the information they need to make public transportation options work with their commute.

PBS.org has profiled one such effort – IAmCaltrain.com, which is utilizing web technology to make regional commuter train schedules easier to decipher. The site allows commuters to type in their starting and ending destinations and it maps the closest train stations and shows when trains are scheduled to arrive.

As websites like IAmCaltrain.com and commuter-driven blogs continue to be created, they are encouraging others in their area to embrace the transportation systems that are available to them as well as voice their opinions about what could be improved.

Cities increasing awareness of public transportation

Cities across America have started to embrace social media to help encourage their citizens to take advantage of the public transportations that are available to them. June 16 was the 6^th Annual Dump the Pump Day, sponsored by the American Public Transportation Association (APTA). APTA partnered with cities across the U.S. to encourage citizens to park their cars and utilizing public transportation for the day.

As reported by StatePress.com, the City of Tempe was one of the public organizations that participated in APTA’s annual event. City employees turned to a method they knew would be effective to get the words out to Arizonians—they went to Twitter and Facebook to encourage residents to choose public transit, showing the cost savings available through using alternative modes of transportation (gas prices in the Phoenix area have been hovering between $3.50 and $4.00 per gallon since 2008).

Outside of government, citizens and the private sector are asserting greater control over transit information.  Google Transit is now the go-to source for routes and schedules over much of the world, and many transit agencies are increasingly deferring to Google rather than maintaining their own expensive systems. 

More importantly, Google’s standard public data formats let anyone access route, schedule, and even real-time location data.  As a result, entrepreneurs have developed countless web and phone applications to present and customize transit data, so that customers can increasingly choose the style and emphasis that they want in their own information.   Down at the grass roots, activists are even drawing new styles of map for their transit systems, promoting these through social media, and getting their transit agency’s attention as a result.

What Comes Next?  Innovation

Most leading transit agencies now have Facebook and Twitter accounts, and some put significant effort into both listening and communicating via these tools.  The trick, of course, is not just to listen for suggestions and opinions, but also to notice how the whole communication task is evolving as new tools are invented and new ways of using them arise.

The hardest challenge for transit professoinals is simply to be open to innovation arising from the social media sphere.  Sometimes, online innovators will do something better, and more cheaply, than a transit agency can do it.  As that happens, the transit agency's interest may lie in encouraging public innovation, not trying to control or limit it.

guest post: scott johnson on "over-constrained projects"

This is a guest post from EngineerScotty, who blogs at Portland Transport and the Dead Horse Times. It is a follow-up to the recent series of articles on the issue of expertise vs activism, and it further explores the theme of the second article: projects which are over-constrained--those with excessive and sometimes contradictory requirements imposed on them by stakeholders. This post originally appeared at Portland Transport here; the version which appears at Human Transit has been edited and revised for a more global audience.  As always, views expressed in guest posts are interesting to me but not necessarily mine.

Jarrett has been investigating the proper role of the transit planner. Is (s)he a dispassionate expert, much like an engineer is expected to be? Or should planners and other professionals serve a more activist role--essentially serving as advocates of the transit-riding public, and defending their interests? Jarrett, who has made numerous remarks about the limits of mixed-traffic streetcar (and has been accused, unfairly in my opinion, of being a "bus fanatic"), noted that his job has elements of both: He does prefer to optimize for mobility outcomes, and streetcar frequently fares poorly as a mobility measure; but when he takes on a project he needs to live within the project's constraints: If a project which hires Jarrett as a consultant is chartered with building streetcars, then he will help the agency design the best streetcar network that they can afford.

But then, an obnoxious commentor (OK, yours truly) threw a wrench into the gears, asking the essential question. What if the project requirements are nonsensical to begin with? Jarrett's answer focused on the role of transit planners in addressing all of this; and I defer to his expertise on such matters. Instead, this article looks at the more fundamental problem: projects with fundamentally conflicting requirements.

Too many cooks

Many public works projects, especially those in a multi-layer democracy like the United States and other countries with federalist systems, have many, many stakeholders. And not all of those stakeholders have the interest of the general public at heart, let's be honest. Politicians love to show up at ribbon-cuttings, and may have ideological axes to grind. Agencies frequently seek to expand their scope, power, and influence. Developers, vendors, unions, and other parties often want to cash in, and frequently aren't shy at trying to influence decision-makers (often in ways which are perfectly legal). NIMBYs frequently show up who want it somewhere else.

Even among those stakeholders who actively support a project's goals, one can frequently find many demands on a project. Institutions can fall into the "golden hammer" trap, where their job involves swinging hammers and thus view every problem as a nail. Professional societies frequently have standards and practices which they view as sacrosanct, regardless of whether appropriate for a given context. Diverse communities of users may impose conflicting requirements. If grants are part of the funding package, the granting agency will often impose conditions of their own. And spools of bureaucratic red tape will surround the project, particularly if the United States government is involved.

All too often, public works projects collect so many differing requirements and constraints, both legitimate and not, that running the project is like squaring the circle. (For the non-mathematically inclined, constructing a square with the same area as a given circle using only straightedge and compass, was proven impossible in the 19th century). And this is without taking into account financial and schedule constraints. Yet projects which attempt to square the circle--which attempt to satisfy simultaneously many conflicting requirements, often dictated by stakeholders with de facto veto power over the project--still happen way too often, often times with disappointing results.

At least two prominent projects in the Portland, Oregon metropolitan area -- one primarily highway, one exclusively transit -- exhibit signs of being over-constrained. One of them is the Columbia River Crossing (CRC), a project to replace the Interstate Bridge crossing the Columbia River, between Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, Washington. The other is the Lake Oswego-Portland Transit Project, a project which seeks to build a "rapid streetcar" line connecting the city of Portland with its inner suburb of Lake Oswego, using an abandoned rail right-of-way.

The Swiss Army Bridge

The fundamental goal of the CRC ought to be conceptually simple. Modernize (structurally and functionally) the primary crossing of the Columbia, providing multi-modal crossing support, while eliminating the draw span. Straightening out the shipping channel on the river is a bonus. But what has actually happened has been a mess. The first problem is governance. Given that it's a bi-state effort, there isn't any single entity which is an obvious candidate to run the project.  So management was given jointly to the Oregon and Washington State departments of transportation (ODOT, WSDOT), with the participation of the cities of Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, Washington; the counties of Clark and Multnomah; Metro [the Portland regional planning authority]; the Southwest Washington Regional Transportation Council; and the two transit agencies, TriMet and C-Tran.  ODOT and WSDOT drafted purpose-and-need statements that pretty much excluded any solution other than a new freeway bridge. Throw in a pile of rules from various highway manuals and "poof": rather than simply building a bridge, the project now involves rebuilding about five miles of Interstate 5. On Hayden Island, a small island south of the river's primary channel, a new proposed network of ramps and interchanges cuts a swath through the island, nearly as wide as a football pitch is long.

The city of Portland and Metro have their own requirements for the project. It must contain light rail (an extension of the MAX Yellow Line), and other "green" features.  Many in Portland's civic leadership have insisted on an "iconic design" rather than a simple truss bridge.  With all of these design elements, the total proposed cost reached US$4 billion. 

Financing for such a price tag will require that the bridge be tolled. Residents on the Washington side would allegedly bear the brunt of tolls, because many of them commute to jobs in Oregon. The mayor of Vancouver was recently unseated when his challenger ran on the issue of bridge tolls.  Many on the Oregon side have little sympathy for those in Vancouver, whom are accused of wanting the benefits of a large, dynamic city, but of not wanting to contribute to its upkeep. And so on.

The result, at this stage, seems to be a design that nobody really likes, that has a murky funding picture, that has cost eight figures to produce nothing but paper so far, and which has no end date in sight.

Did it have to be this way? That's a hard question. One fundamental issue is that the City of Portland objects to a key design goal of the highway departments on both sides of the river--"modernization" of the freeway (a catchall term which includes widening, ramp reconfiguration, and all sorts of other stuff designed to reduce congestion). While some of Portland's objections spring from ideological or environmental concerns that other stakeholders don't share to the same extent, the city does have a legitimate concern that redesigning the bridge simply will move the existing traffic bottleneck south into Portland's city center. The state departments of transportation, for their part, seem more than willing to hold Portland's transit expansion plans hostage (an ODOT staffer once reportedly suggested that the agency would block any attempt to extend MAX across the Columbia, unless as part of a larger project to widen I-5). And Vancouver doesn't want to be stuck with an ever-escalating bill. Part of the present dynamic seems to involve both sides wishing that someone (Governor Kitzhaber, the feds) would "see the light" and kick the other side to the curb.  

The Lake Oswego Quit Calling It Streetcar (At Least For Now) Project

Compared to the CRC, the Lake Oswego transit project (LOTP) is a model of piece and harmony. The "what" of the project was largely fixed: a streetcar line, running from the current south end of the Portland Streetcar, along the old Jefferson Branch line to Lake Oswego. The project goals make sense: Use an existing asset (the rail right-of-way) to leverage federal funds, and build a transit service running in exclusive right-of-way which ought to be faster than local bus service on Highway 43, a frequently-congested 3-5 lane surface route. Demonstrate the potential of "rapid streetcar" as a budget alternative to light rail for shorter corridors. A no-brainer, right? Unlike the CRC, where leadership was distributed among a handful of agencies with contrary goals and a decided lack of trust, the involved government agencies (TriMet, Metro, and the cities of Portland and Lake Oswego) aren't fighting over the project requirements. But the devil, as is often the case, is in the details.

The most fundamental issue is that the project is promoted as rapid transit--as an upgrade over the existing bus service (TriMet's 35 and 36 lines, which the streetcar would replace between Portland and Lake Oswego).  But this premise is undermined by the proposed implementation. The project is currently planned to be an extension of the existing Portland Streetcar system, which offers local-stop service along is present route, and which bypasses the main transit corridor downtown (the Portland Transit Mall). Portland Streetcar's current rolling stock (Skoda 10T streetcars and a clone produced by Oregon Iron Works), are optimized for mixed-traffic application, not for rapid transit use. In addition, many local merchants on Highway 43 in the Johns Landing neighborhood want streetcar service at their front door; whereas many condo owners along the existing right-of-way don't want trains past their front door. (Never mind that the rail line has been there far longer than the condos). Thus, the streetcar line is likely to make an expensive detour onto Highway 43--the same highway which is predicted to turn into a parking lot in the near future, justifying the mobility need for the project in the first place.

Unlike the new Milwaukie MAX line directly across the river, which is designed to function well as rapid transit until hitting downtown, the streetcar is not so designed.  It's likely to be slower than the existing bus between Lake Oswego and downtown, and that's without considering the need for riders travelling from/to beyond Lake Oswego to transfer.  Bus lines 35 and 36 from beyond Lake Oswego, which now flow through Lake Oswego into Portland, will have to be truncated, forcing a connection to the new streetcar.  This is necessary both to avoid duplication and to provide operating funds for the streetcar line.

The streetcar does offer modest capacity improvements over the bus, and has the cachet of being rail.  (That cachet is a source of debate in transit circles, but will likely have an impact given the demographics along the line).  But the mobility improvements of the project are close to nil; and for longer-distance commuters on the 35 and 36, probably a net negative.  Perhaps land-use improvements alleged to flow from the project will be worth the local investment, though much of the area along the line is already developed or not suitable for development. Perhaps the ability to get a big check from the US Government for a minimal local cash contribution--given that the federal government is willing to consider the value of the right-of-way in calculating their match--makes the project worth doing. This is a difficult case to make, however, to the transit-riding public, who tend to care more about headways and trip times than they do about property values.

Signs of an over-constrained project

Here at Human Transit, another commenter posed an interesting question: How do you know if a project has requirements or constraints that make it difficult to do a good job? The question was posed in the context of bad-faith requirements (such as developers engaging in rent-seeking), but the answers also apply to good faith attempts to square the circle. My response is here; the answers are also reproduced below, edited for brevity. (In particular, observations about the CRC and Lake Oswego streetcar projects which are redundant with the criticisms above are excised; if you want to see the original answers, click the link).

• Overly constrained initial project requirements. It's useful to distinguish here bona-fide requirements from design/implementation details, the latter of which ought to flow from the former. But sometimes, elements which ought to be details are set forth in the requirements without adequate explanation of why this should be so. Sometimes these requirements aren't stated explicitly, but still are constrained enough that only the solution preferred by the powerbroker can meet them. [CRC used as example]
• Decision criteria which may not match the stated goals of the project. For example, publicly identifying a project as "rapid transit" but then de-emphasizing speed and reliability, or basing decisions on highly speculative future estimates. [LOTP used as example]
• Thee presence of strawman alternatives in the DEIS (Draft Environmental Impact Statement) or equivalent planning/analysis document. By "strawman alternatives", I mean proposed alternatives which are obviously bad, and included only to satisfy process requirements that multiple alternatives be studied in depth. [LOTP "enhanced bus" used as example; in this case, a more robust BRT solution was excluded from analysis early in the project..which lead us to the next item...]
• Viable project alternatives rejected early in the planning phase, often due to being "out of scope" (see the first item concerning overly restrictive requirements), or on the basis of vague or overly-picky technical factors. Look for signs that point to "this might work, but we really don't want to (or aren't allowed to) consider it, so we'll dispose of it as quickly as we can". [Many have alleged that the proposed "supplemental bridge" alternative to the CRC is another example].
• Projects that appear "out of the blue", rather than the result of organic planning activities, or which are done "out of sequence" compared to their apparent priority. May represent a unique opportunity (such a project eligible for funding that isn't available for other projects) or it may be a sign that someone has his thumb on the scale.
• "Economic development" being touted as an advantage is a frequent red flag.  This is always touted, of course, but if "economic development" is the main reason for doing a project (and especially if the "development" in question refers mainly to the project's construction effort itself and not to post-project activities the work will enable) a good response is to ask if there are any places to deploy the "economic development" that will have better post-project outcomes.  Paying someone to dig ditches and refill them can be considered "economic development" in that it does create jobs, but it's better to pay people to build useful things.
• And one other, not in the HT article: The use of unproven or untested designs or methodologies in the project, or anything dubbed "experimental".  Until recently, the CRC was considering an experimental bridge design, until cooler heads prevailed.

Of course, not all over-constrained projects are failures. Westside MAX had some annoying constraints placed on it, but is overall a successful project.  Still, had ten extraneous stops been sprinkled along the line between Portland and Hillsboro, would the line be as successful?

Dealing with over-constrained projects

What to do about all of this?   The hard fact about overconstrained projects is that often, we have to live with them.  It's easy to fantasize about driving bad actors out of the process, and about having strong visionary leaders who have the foresight and the clout to sweep conflicting requirements out of the way, without losing support for the project.  But such individuals are rare, and in many of these projects -- notably the CRC -- nobody in the process, not even the governors, are in the position to act unilaterally.  Still, a few suggestions come to mind:

• Governance matters. It's hard with multiple stakeholders. In the case of the CRC, the first step to fixing the project would be for the stakeholders to jointly hire an outside project leader; one who has no particular ties to either Oregon or Washington, or to the various modal factions, to lead the project. Of course, for such a leader to be effective, the various agencies will need to cede a fair bit of authority to said leader; I'm not sure any of them are willing to do so at this point.
• Sunlight is the best disinfectant. A transparent process, one where decisions can be easily traced to inputs and planning work products are available for inspection, may help cut down on (or at least expose) some of the pettier forms of backroom dealing. Bad actors don't like being subject to public scrutiny. Transparency also helps good-faith projects avoid accusations of backroom dealing; virtually every large capital project gets accused of being done in order to grease someone's palm; an accusation which is frequently not true.
• Be prepared to say no. The City of Portland has won some concessions on the CRC with this tactic, but if a project is really going off the rails, cancellation should always be an option.
• Bifurcation and phasing may work. A controversial and difficult project can sometimes be split up into two or more separate projects.  Often, though, the political impetus is in the opposite direction, creating more linkages between projects so as to create a package containing something that everyone wants.
• Better advocacy for users. One of the unfortunate parts of transit advocacy in the Portland area is a lack of effective organization of transit users. Freight users of the highway system are well-organized, and often asking government for better freight mobility. The auto lobby is likewise strong and forceful. Even the cycling community in Portland is relatively-well organized. Transit users in the city do have some organized advocates, but many of these activists represent subset of the overall transit community (such as lower-income inner city bus riders), not transit users as a whole. Beleaguered transit agencies, especially ones looking to grow their ridership base, can't always represent the interests of their existing ridership.

That said, not all gloom and doom is justified. Over-constrained projects do end up successful, despite warts. This is especially true when the bulk of the constraints come from actual community needs that happen to be in conflict (such as simultaneous demands for access and mobility). Portland's MAX system, overall, threads the access/mobility needle reasonably well, although not perfectly. Some critics of the system complain about too many highway-running segments without development potential; others complain that it's too slow downtown, and uncompetitive for crosstown trips. However, were MAX to offer streetcar-like performance over its entire length, it probably would not attract the ridership that it does (especially the large number of suburban commuters using the system); conversely, were it required to be built to "class A" levels of mobility throughout the system, it probably could not have been built at all. The flip-side of the overconstrained project is one which has too many degrees of freedom--and which may not be taking as many community needs into account as it should--or in the worst cases, such as the destruction wrought by urban freeway-building, result from the neglect of a particular community's concerns altogether.

guest post policy

I'm a big believer in clear policies, so now, in addition to the comment policy, there's a new guest post policy.  I could use some good guest posts in the next few weeks, because the book is taking some time!

edmonton: strasbourg of the prairie?

A Guest Post by David Marlor

David Marlor was raised in the UK and is currently a regional planning manager working on the coast of British Columbia, Canada in a coastal rural setting.  He holds a planning degree from the School of Community and Regional Planning at UBC, where his thesis was on an integrated approach to transportation planning in the lower mainland.

In the past couple of years, led by Bob Boutilier (general manager of transportation) the City has been planning the expansion of the LRT using low-floor technology.  Edmonton is credited with leading in transit innovation twice in the past. In the mid-1960s, transit superintendent Don MacDonald introduced an early version of a hub and spoke [or pulse] transit system. This is still widely used in Edmonton and in many other North American cities. The second was the introduction of the modern LRT to North America in 1978.

What’s different about the current LRT plans in Edmonton is that instead of fast LRT trains moving commuters from suburbs to the city, the LRT will be a European style system, still in its own right of way, but with stops closer together, smaller and more intimate with the community, low floor vehicles and replacing car lanes with LRT lanes. That last is a paradigm shift for Edmonton.  LRT up until now has been about building it without removing road capacity for private automobiles. The new LRT lines, the cost of which is currently pegged at about Cdn$3.4 billion, will see extension of the existing high-floor system to the north-west north-east and south as demand warrants, but the lines will fit the community better than before.

The approved plans includes a completely new low-floor network running on the street, even in the city centre. It is a system designed to support future TOD at the stations, to encourage higher densities. Unlike the existing system, only five stations on the proposed 29 station low floor line have bus stations attached to them and only two have park and ride facilities, both adjacent to freeways. This is about shaping the city, not moving commuters from the suburbs to the city (although that is part of it, it is not the focus).  The plan includes future low-floor line linking the downtown with the Old Strathcona business district on the Southside of the river and a line out to the eastern suburbs.

In fact, the proposed the proposed Edmonton system may remind some readers of Strasbourg. Like Strasbourg, Edmonton is envisioning completely remodeling the streets the trams run on – in many cases removing lanes of traffic, restricting turn movements, closing or redesigning intersections, and where possible, widening and improving the pedestrian infrastructure. Like Strasbourg, the stations (stops) will be located every 3-4 blocks (300-400 metres) in the city centre and further apart outside the core. The aim is around every 800 m, but in reality the stops will be placed at convenient nodes or logical locations that best fit the fabric of the city.

The City of Edmonton website has extensive information, including design details, routing, and illustrations. Unfortunately, the project is not funded yet, but City Council and the Mayor are keen to see it happen and want to get it built in the next 6-8 years. The plans are ambitious, and it's exciting to see a car-oriented oil producing city like Edmonton be thinking and supportive of this direction.

Illustration: Simulated image by City of Edmonton

 

guest post: richard lenthall on the busways of almere, netherlands

Richard Lenthall is the founder of Sight of the Navigator, a European travel and transit advisory website based in Amsterdam. It aims to improve tomorrow’s journey experience by bringing together transit providers and their passengers.

Transit and urban planners will no doubt be familiar with the “Bus Lane”, the concept of designating a lane or segment of road exclusively for the use of buses and other permitted vehicles.  When properly executed bus lanes can save time over the same section of a journey made with a car, and provide operators the means to keep to timetables during the rush hours, both of which can promote the use of public transit.

Due to constraints in most established and developed urban areas, the bus lane is something of a compromise.  The weakness of a bus lane, and where the efficiency gain is most often compromised, is at intersections with other major road arteries where the priority for the bus cannot be continued.  At these points the bus often has to compete to rejoin the normal flow of traffic and then queue normally on an equal footing.  Compounding this weakness are features of more poorly planned bus lanes such as temporary operating hours and scenarios where the bus has to either turn against the flow of oncoming traffic, or manoeuvre across the road in preparation for a junction.   (An example of the latter can be seen at Piccadilly, London roughly once every 2 minutes during the day.)  All of these weaknesses counteract the idea of giving the bus priority.  Journey time starts to suffer, where properly separated transit would be able to continue unhindered.

In an ideal world the bus lane would cover the whole of the route, maintain constant separation from other traffic and a priority at intersections, as this would guarantee the value to the user.  Such an ideology is beyond the scope and budget of many developed urban councils as it would imply a complete redesign of an existing road system. 

But what if you were able to work from a completely blank canvas? How would it work in reality?  To illustrate this theory I’d like to show you the town of Almere in The Netherlands.

The Blank Canvas

Almere is one of The Netherlands’ famous reclaimed land projects lying on artificial islands, 25km northeast of Amsterdam.  This new land provided urban designers with the opportunity to build both a normal road system and a separated bus-way network that are deeply interwoven throughout the town.  Stepping off the train at Almere Centrum you immediately see signs of how this has been done.

Directly underneath the railway station are bus stops which combine to serve as Almere’s transit hub.  Here buses serve all parts of the town with the trains above going directly to Amsterdam, Utrecht and Schiphol Airport.  While this is a good idea and the result of well thought out planning there is nothing special right here, so let’s turn around.

On the busway, car traffic is absent and no bikes are allowed.  Crucially, for the success of the scheme and the efficiency aims, the bus way doesn’t end when it reaches a junction,  Instead the buses are afforded the benefit of pro-active signalling at traffic intersections even if those junctions are very central to the town.

 

A little further out we can see how the planning of regularly spaced stops at roughly 700m on the bus-way have been incorporated into the social fabric.  The next picture is taken at the Almere Haven stop where housing, shopping, a bar and the bus stop (which also gets services direct to Amsterdam’s business districts) have all been incorporated into the area’s design.

How does it work in practice?

Elsewhere on Human Transit, Jarrett has argued that if you provide a Bus service with grade separation and proactive signalling, which are the usual provisions for Light Rail or Tram networks, buses can operate to the same high degree of efficiency as rail based systems, and in Almere that is exactly what’s been done. 

In this video you can watch the bus-way in action.  Taken at a junction, the video shows how the system works when the bus-way crosses an arterial road.  See how the first bus triggers the advanced warning system and the traffic lights controlling the conflicting road traffic turn red before the bus has to slow down.  Once the bus passes the system checks to see if another bus is in the control zone, and then reverts to green.  Shortly after, two red buses arrive and the cycle repeats, this time keeping the road traffic on hold until the second bus has passed through.  None of the buses that passed through had to stop.  Delay to traffic was kept to a minimum and efficiency was optimal for everyone regardless of your choice of transport.

Here you can see how the integrity of the bus way has been preserved despite it running through a busier urban intersection and close to a shopping precinct.

Finally in this video you can see how the bus way performs from the driver’s point of view.  Using magnetic induction loops buried into the bus-way the passing of the bus triggers the advanced warning system.  This checks and changes the traffic signal ahead so that the bus can pass through without having to slow down or stop. (The advanced signal is the white vertical stripe, when it’s lit the bus driver knows the standard traffic light will automatically change in his favour).

In all three videos the buses have exclusive use of the right of way ensuring safety and optimising performance for the service.  The videos demonstrate how capable any bus-way can be if you create a network where buses and other road users don’t compete for access and install a proactive signalling system that ensures priority for the bus.

A Matter of Philosophy

To exploit the opportunity presented by the blank canvas of new land, it must have been important to the urban planners to establish a philosophy for the bus-way and bus services.  This philosophy would have been that they were going to treat the bus not as merely another road vehicle but instead as a means of transport that was going to be afforded clear rights of way, prioritisation and separation as far as absolutely possible.  The consequence of fully pursuing that philosophy is a bus-way network that at first glance operates in a way that’s akin to a tram, metro or even railway network.  The planners of Almere chose not compromise.

The next post on Almere's busways is here!

guest post: aaron priven on the ac transit (oakland-berkeley) transit map

Continuing the recent series on frequent network maps, today's post is by Aaron Priven, who actually managed the redesign of a network map. I don't agree with everything he says, but the resulting map (current version here in PDF, here in a version that you can pan and zoom online) certainly shows a lot of thought, and it's interesting to see the thought process explained.  I'll share my own responses to this map in a near-future post.

 
Jarrett’s post on frequency mapping, and a number of the comments there, referred to the AC Transit system maps. (AC Transit is the bus system for a large portion of the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay, including cities such as Oakland, Berkeley, Richmond, and Fremont.)

I was the project manager for the redesign of the AC Transit system map back in 2002-2003. As such I am primarily responsible for its design, although most of the specifics were worked out by our cartographer, Kristin Bergstrom, who had previously designed the San Francisco Muni map.

One basic principle we wanted to follow was that there should be a one-to-one correspondence between the ink lines and the bus lines. Many American maps are like the Seattle map, pictured here, where no matter how many bus lines are on a street, they are shown by a single ink line. Trying to understand where a single line goes is very difficult on these maps. One has to hunt around for the bubbles to figure out where the route is going, and sometimes this can be very obscure. For example, on the Seattle map shown in Jarrett’s post, pictured here, there is a Line 30 bubble on Dexter Ave N., and another one further west, on an unlabeled street near Queen Anne Ave. N. How does Line 30 get between the two places? Does it dip downtown and come back in a U, or does it travel on one of the two sets of east-west streets shown? Or does it do something else entirely?

We wanted to make it easy to figure out how to follow where a bus line goes, which we thought was a basic goal of any bus map.

We followed the lead of the Paris and New York maps in using colors designed to be as distinct as possible from neighboring routes, so it would be easy to follow the red, blue, or green line from place to place.

At that time, we were introducing new LED headsign, which were capable of showing several different colors. One compromise we made was that we limited ourselves to the colors available on these headsigns (or as close as we could get in print).

The advantage of using colored headsigns is that it becomes clearer much further away that the headsign is blue than what the route number is. If you’re two blocks away and you want to know whether that bus in the distance is the 11 bus you need, or the 62 bus you don’t, it’s very nice to be able to see the purple light and know that you have time to go get a coffee, because the 11 will be blue-green.

Unfortunately, the color gamut of the headsigns is limited. On the 2001 Paris map, they used a range of different colors – red, maroon, blue, purple, yellow, brown, chartreuse… We did not have those choices. Our choices were restrained even further a few years later when the California Highway Patrol decided the red headsigns looked too much like red reverse lights and started giving tickets to buses showing red! We had to reassign the colors to avoid using red, reducing our palette even further. (We tried to get legislation passed to change this, but while we successfully got legislation to allow us to use most colors, we were still not allowed red.)

For line and bubble symbology, we considered a number of different aspects of each line. We did consider frequency, but we ultimately decided that the most important aspects were variance, span of service, and express running.

Variance: Even more than now, we had a lot of bus lines that had several different variants – different weekday and weekend routes, routes shortened off-peak, two branches serving different areas, and so forth. Many of these did not have distinct route numbers, even using suffixes. We used different dash patterns to show different variants, and keyed the dash patterns to the frequency guide on the back of the map (which had a from-x to-y listing, inspired by Chicago).

Span of service: AC Transit had no regularity when it came to span of service , with different lines operating radically different spans, and while usually frequent service had a longer span, there were many exceptions. There was no standard span for “all day” service. We felt that the most urgent question someone could ask was “can I get home on this line?” For that we decided to base bubble symbols on hours of operation. Originally we had bubble shapes for peak service, 24-hour service, several kinds of all-day service depending on what time the last bus left the origin of the line (after 6 p.m., after 7 p.m., after 8 p.m., after 10 p.m., and after midnight), and a catchall “weird” category for weekend-only service, midday-only service, or other strange hours. If there was any service on the line on weekends, the bubble was solid; otherwise, it was hollow. (I’m not sure where the idea came from that we distinguished Saturday from Sunday service – in fact for years all of our Saturday and Sunday schedules have been identical, except for later service on two All Nighter routes because BART starts later on Sunday.)

As time went on we made some changes, most importantly reducing the number of “all day” bubbles to two, and accommodating the change from 24-hour service on some lines to having parallel 800-series All Nighter lines.

Express running: Clearly if a bus is running on a street but doesn’t stop, that’s an important distinction. Much of our express running is on freeways, but not all, and we have a number of limited stop services. I liked the way this was shown on the Muni map, with thin lines with round stops where the limited stops were, and we copied that, more or less, for our map.

The other important feature we wanted to have was a complete street map along with the transit map, so that people wouldn’t need to consult two different maps. We had a complete street index and intended at some point to add block numbers whenever possible, although the block numbers never quite happened. (The current map does not have all this detail, mainly because of printing costs.)

So that’s what we were thinking back in 2003. I’m not sure we were very successful, and I think much of it needs rethinking. I thought at the time that people who didn’t understand the differences between dash patterns or bubble types would just ignore those differences, rather than be frustrated and confused by their lack of understanding. We didn’t (and don’t) have the money to do user tests of any of this, and I think that’s something we could have found out.

Nonetheless, I think a lot of the principles we adopted are still worth thinking about.

It’s clear from Jarrett’s August 7 post that he uses “The Frequent Network” as a name for service that is both frequent and has a long span of service, but at least at AC Transit the two don’t always go together. Which is a “major route,” a 15-minute service that runs from 6 to 7, or a 30-minute service that runs from 6 to midnight? We’ve had both of those in the past. Maybe this is a detail, and it doesn’t matter as long as “major” is defined in some consistent way, but frequency is just one aspect of a bus route. I, at least, would rather wait 30 minutes for an infrequent bus than wait two hours before finding out that this bus line has no more buses scheduled for the day, or doesn’t run at all today.

We have all kinds of routes, and not all of them fall in the simple categories of “Frequent Network,” “Infrequent All-day services” and “Peak-only service.”

I am still very concerned that on most bus maps it’s too hard to figure out where some lines go.  Our service has so many different lines along certain streets (Broadway, MacArthur, Shattuck, the loop around Hayward BART) that on our map individual lines get lost in the elongated pastel rainbow, especially when we’re limited to colors that are so non-distinct. (What do you mean you can’t tell the difference between the three shades of teal??)  But I’m not convinced it’s any better to basically combine them all and hope people can search out the bubbles, especially when in the real world that kind of map is easy to make errors in creating. (It’s not at all obvious which bus line a particular ink line refers to, especially if the bus line it originally referred to was rerouted or eliminated some time ago but this ink line was neglected. Little short stretches of ink line, one or two blocks long, end up staying on the map years after the bus line is gone.)

The highway map analogy, with different types of ink lines for different levels of service, would lead to a better conclusion than a flat all-the-same map like Seattle’s. Better a few types of line than just one. But transit is inherently more complex than the street network in that multiple lines can and often do go along the same street for long stretches, and it is important to know which. If you are planning a trip across town, you need to know precisely where your transfer point is, and where particular bus lines go. It needs to be as easy as possible to figure that out.

Ultimately, the question behind all of this is how to show the complexity of our system. In an ideal world we might simplify the system itself, but this wasn't a choice open to us in the map project. We chose to try to capture the complexity of the system in the map rather than hide it away by creating something simpler, since we felt this would mislead potential riders. It is a disservice to passengers to portray the system as other than it is.