Human Transit

what maps should be at stops and stations?

Yesterday I linked to a fine polemic by Kerwin Datu of the Global Urbanist, regarding London's much-imitated wayfinding system.  Datu reserved particular scorn for the "spider maps" presented at certain stops and stations, which show you only the bus lines that emanate from there.  Maps like this one.  (This is actually the west half of a map showing bus routes from the bright yellow area where the map would be posted.)

 

Datu's quip again:

These maps, which TfL call 'spider maps', fail at the very first task: helping you identify your destination. Normally, once you've found where you're going on a map, you work backwards to where you are. But not here. On these spider maps, you are only shown where the closest bus routes want to take you, not where you want to go. It's like the old joke they tell beyond the Pale: when asking a local for directions one is told, 'well, if that's where you want to go, I wouldn't start from here!'

The maps have many defenders, however, so I should expand on why Datu's polemic resonates with me.

First of all, of course, the London maps only make sense at all in a network where all bus lines can be assumed to be frequent.  That's true in inner London but not in many of the systems that imitate it.   If we show the customer a big, bright line direct from their location to their destination, we're conveying an impression of physical existence.  The bright line looks like a physical thing, like a road, not just the site of an occasional service event.  The whole point of Frequent Network mapping, of frequent buses and rapid transit, is that we want people to make exactly that association, to see frequent services as always there ready for them to use.

But when we use such a bright line to refer to an hourly or peak-only or nighttime-only service, we undermine that message and give a misleading impression.  Strong lines on the map suggest continuous existence on analogy with rapid transit lines, but these infrequent and short-span lines don't exist most of the time. They are probably not there when you need them.

All that, of course, is part of the case for transit maps that reflect frequency/span categories, both emphasising frequent and long-span services and specifically de-emphasising ephemeral ones like peak-only or night-only services.

But there's a more specific issue with spider maps or "buses from here" maps.  They promote single-seat rides while concealing connection opportunities.  More generally, they discourage people from discovering how to navigate the complete network.

There are contexts where this is fine.  At an outer suburban station where the only bus services are local circulators and links to a few nearby suburbs, the "spider map" allows the customer to see the complete local network without having to find it in a massive map of the whole system.

But there's a different way to organize mapping at stops/stations that might be both more truthful and would help people see more clearly (a) the structure of frequent services that are easy to use even with connections and (b) the necessary detail for all services in a local area.  That would be to provide two maps:

• A Frequent Network map for the entire city (or if the city is as big as London, maybe a large subarea of the city).   This map would have a prominent "you are here" mark, but its function would to say "here's everywhere you can go from here, on service that's available right now."  (You could simplify this map by deleting some Frequent services that would not conceivably be useful on any possible trip from "here," but if you think broadly there usually aren't many of those.)  This map would also convey a very useful subliminal message: "here is where you are in your city, and in your network."   At least for spatial navigators, this map has a useful long-term value in helping people internalize the network so that they can navigate it more freely and spontaneously in the future. 


• A local area map, showing all routes emanating from "here" (or perhaps all routes with those from "here" highlighted) but just out to a radius of several km.  The ideal radius is the distance beyond which you should usually be looking for rapid line, possibly with a connection, rather than a local bus line from "here."  The local area map should be strongly coded to highlight Frequent services and downplay peak-only and other short-span services. 

In both cases, lines exiting the map area should be labelled at the edge with any more distant destinations that you would logically use that line, from "here," to reach.  (That may not be all the places the line goes.)

This approach would not lead the customer as precisely as a spider map or "buses from here" map does, but nor would it mislead the customer as much as those maps can sometimes do.  Sometimes, the fastest way to get from here to there involves making a connection, but the connection may be very easy and very frequent, and we should resist mapping styles that conceal those opportunities. 

That's my instinct, but maybe it's just my prejudice.  What do you think?

 

 

london: questioning sacred maps

Are you tired of hearing that London does everything right when it comes to transit?  Do you wonder if the mapping styles widely copied from London are always the best?   Are you even open to the heresy that London's famous Underground map, despite its global reach as an image, may be less than perfect?  Then you'll enjoy Kerwin Datu's affectionate take-down of London's information system, at the Global Urbanist.  My favorite bit, about the image above:

These maps, which TfL call 'spider maps', fail at the very first task: helping you identify your destination. Normally, once you've found where you're going on a map, you work backwards to where you are. But not here. On these spider maps, you are only shown where the closest bus routes want to take you, not where you want to go. It's like the old joke they tell beyond the Pale: when asking a local for directions one is told, 'well, if that's where you want to go, I wouldn't start from here!'

UPDATE:  Excellent arguments in London's defense, in the comments.  More responsible followup by me here.

chicago: living the grid

If you visit Chicago, and a local friend tells you to meet her at the Western "L" station, then either (a) she's not really your friend or (b) she isn't as local as she claims.  There are five stations called Western in the Chicago rapid transit network:

These duplicate names arise from naming stations solely after a cross street, without reference to the street or path the rail line is following.

But the secret language of Chicago transit desires is even more subtle.  If your friend tells you to meet her at Western Brown Line station, she's probably a local, but if she directs you to Western Blue Line station, you're still in trouble.  As you can see above, there are two.  This one is the more scenic, but note the absence of any signage that might distinguish it from the other one:

Although there are a small handful of duplicate station names in other New World gridded cities (one pair in Buenos Aires, four pairs in Cleveland, two pairs in Philadelphia), New York City is the only system I know of where you'll see the same naming style used in force. 

Few agencies, however, would give the same name to two stations on the same line, as Chicago does.  Toronto, one of the few big cities that's as relentlessly gridded as Chicago, is obviously at pains to avoid it.  Their U-shaped north-south subway line crosses many main streets twice, and in each case they append "West" to the name of the more westerly of the two. 

Los Angeles, like Chicago, has a long Western Avenue that has two stations where different branches of a rail line cross it.  But they didn't call both stations "Western."  They used the full co-ordinates:  "Wilshire/Western" as opposed to "Hollywood/Western."

How do Chicagoans cope with all these duplicate names, even on the same line? No big deal, says Jeff Busby, a Chicago-sourced transit planner now at Vancouver's TransLink:

In partial answer to your question, I would observe that the grid is an overriding organizing element for Chicagoans.  Everyone knows that State and Madison is 0N/S & 0E/W and coordinates are powerful for knowing where you are and how to get somewhere else.  Station platform signs give the N/S & E/W coordinates.  Station names that reinforce their location in the grid are valuable.  I know that Ashland is 1600W and Western is 2400W so that new restaurant I’ve never been to at 2200W is probably closer to the Western station.

To minimize clutter on the system map, stations are generally named for the arterial that crosses perpendicular to the rail line, but in the local language (and the on-board announcements) they are known by both cross streets. For example, the Loop stations are known as State/Lake, Clark/Lake, Randolph/Wabash, Library-State/Van Buren, etc even though they are abbreviated on maps as State, Clark, Randolph and Library.

In this sense, having five "Western" stations is not as confusing at it might seem.  First, it immediately orients you to where they are -- on Western Avenue, accessible by the 49-Western bus that travels from Berwyn (5300N) south to 79th (7900S), and a local suggesting that you meet at the “Western L station” would probably use a different term (from North to South):

• Western (Brown Line) – Lincoln Square (after the neighborhood)
• Western (O’Hare Blue Line) – Western/Milwaukee
• Western (Forest Park Blue Line) – Western/Congress (or Eisenhower)
• Western (Pink Line) – Western/Cermak
• Western (Orange Line) – Probably Western - Orange Line as it’s not on a major E/W arterial

Indeed, the near universal repetition of grid number coordinates is a striking thing in Chicago.  You'll find them on every streetsign and every platform station name sign.

So it really is possible to ignore all the street names and navigate a city of co-ordinates, much as you would do in Utah cities where you'll encounter street names like "7200 South Street". 

Unique features of a transit system are often keys to the spirit of the city.  Grids were fundamental to the rapid settlement of the midwest and west, so for Chicago -- a city built on commerce to and from those regions -- the strong grid is an expression of the city's economic might.  All cities have street networks, but few cities attach such strong symbolic value to the nature of their street network, or celebrate it so explicitly. 

And its certainly true that if you ignore the street names and embrace Chicago's numerical grid, there's never any doubt where you are, but of course that implies a sense of "where" that is itself grid-defined.  I'm sure Parisians take pride in the complete gridlessness of their city, and would say that "Place de la Bastille" is a much more satisfying answer to the question "where?" than any grid coordinates would be.  But then, Paris wasn't built to conquer a frontier.

 

can transit-only streets work in small cities?

Yes, says Wellington, New Zealand (pop. 389,000)!

In North American debates about pedestrian and transit malls, we're usually told that such things only work in Europe, with the implication that age, historic density, and cultural history of European cities makes them unrealistic mentors for the young North American city.  Well, as an urban culture, New Zealand is even younger than North America.  In fact, the urbanization of both Australia and New Zealand happened around the same time as that of the North American west, and the level of attachment to cars is also comparable.  So North America needs a better excuse!

Wellington's "Golden Mile," long the core business strip and highrise office district, is now a two-lane, largely bus-only facility, the last bit of which was finished last November.  It features generous sidewalks, near-continuous awnings for shelter (a city requirement) and hardly any commercial vacancies.   In fact, the whole thing appeared to be bustling throughout my stay the past week, with plenty of pedestrians and plenty of activity around the abundant street-level retail that lines the entire thing. 

The pic above, of course, was taken by the City on a perfect sunny day.  Having spent most of the last week in a conference room, I can offer only pics taken early in the morning:

 

Note the green paint.  In Australia and New Zealand there is never any question about where bus lanes are, and zero excuse for not noticing them.  Note also that the red bus is about to turn right from one green lane into another; the Golden Mile isn't entirely straight, but the green lines (and abundant buses) make it perfectly clear where it is, and how it works.

I'll come back to some of the interesting details of the Golden Mile, but meanwhile, next time someone tells you that North American cities can't emulate Europe, ask why they can't emulate New Zealand!

First photo:  City of Wellington

seoul: buses that tell you where they go?

Regarding Place has a good article on the recent reform of bus services in Seoul, South Korea.

Seoul has done something that I often hear people ask for, a simple citywide color scheme that helps make the structure of the bus system obvious.  The four colors of bus correspond to four types of service:

• Blue buses run in reserved median busways on major arterials, and appear to be mostly radial (into and out of the urban core.)
• Green buses are feeders that tend to run locally within a particular area.
• Red buses are "express" to and from outer suburbs.  It's not completely clear if this is peak commuter express or frequent all-day service (which I usually call "Rapid").  Express is a slippery word.
• Yellow buses are orbital lines, thus tend to be perpendicular to the blue and red ones.

I have mixed feelings about this sorting.  Usually I prefer to make distinctions about frequency and service span, but if overall frequencies are high I can certainly see the value in this system.  In a city with a clear distinction between radial and orbital directions, which Seoul seems to have, the distinctions can probably help people orient about which direction is which at various points, and to discern the general directions that each bus might go.

The same thinking extends to numbering system.  Traditionally, most big urban areas have had a sub-area based numbering, where in fact it may make more sense to number lines in ways that heighten the distinction between different service types. 

Most big cities, of course, simply don't have the centralized control to do this.  Los Angeles Metro has made an effort with its Rapid vs Local branding, but most color schemes are tied to the brands of municipal operators whose service is entangled with Metro's.  Cities with a single consolidated transit agency could do it.  In Australia, any state government could do it, though it would need to gain ownership of fleets that are currently owned by private operating companies. 

Obviously, you're sacrificing "operational flexiblity" in terms of being able to deploy any bus on any line.  Now and then in Los Angeles you'll see a Local bus on a Rapid line and vice versa.  I think Seoul deals with this by running all buses of one color out of one operating base, often with a separate contract operator, so the systems are functionally separate.

If you've been to Seoul and seen this system in action, please share your impressions.

london's northern headache

Commenter David M on what rivers teach about transit:

It's interesting to note that in London the newest Underground lines have no branches (Victoria, Jubilee). In fact, when Jubilee was originally opened it took over one of the Bakerloo Lines branches, reducing the Bakerloo to a branchless line also.

For real complications, look at Camden Town [top center] on the Northern Line [black on this classic map] in London, England. Just south of this station is a complex deep underground junction that lets trains from any two of the branches south of Camden to simultaneously run on any two of the branches to the north. It is a marvel of engineering, but it is also an operational nightmare with trains run from any branch to any branch - one train runs late and it can cause problems on all of the branches.

London has wanted to simplify the operations by spliting the line into two and requiring an interchange at Camden Town. There are four platforms at Camden Town but the interchange passages are insufficient to handle the expected interchange traffic - so for now, it is cheaper to suck it up and deal with the operational issues.

There is an interesting effect of this interchange. Going south, both branches serve Euston Station before heading off to cross London on two different lines serving different areas of the core. You can get on one train at Camden, stop at Mornington Crescent and at Euston. You could get on the following train at Camden and arrive at Euston without passing through Mornington Crescent. The reason is that Mornington Crescent is on only one of the two branches, the other just bypasses the station. It makes for fun time when trying to get to Mornington Crescent.

The other night a Sydney rail expert was telling me that when the North West line is built, creating a four-way junction at Epping similar to the one at Camden Town, they will spend a number extra millions on the tunnelling to create the ability to route trains from any segment to any other.  A similar decision has already been made about a similar junction at Glenfield in Sydney's southwest.  I wonder how much could be saved if we let lines cross without connecting track, and required connections, where that pattern makes sense as part of a larger grid.  It's not the right answer everywhere, certainly, but it sounds like London transit experts aren't very appreciative of all the flexibility that their great-grandparents gave them with the design of the Northern Line.

sydney: it's 10 pm, do you know where your buses are?

This won't amaze readers in places like San Francisco or Boston, which have had Nextbus.com for years. But it's an important step for Australia.  Realtime locations of Sydney's buses, via a new app by Flink Labs of Melbourne.

Not sure what the colours mean.  They need to be colour-coded for inbound vs outbound, which otherwise can't be distinguished. 

Thanks to Chris Loader, who blogs about Australian public transport at Charting Transport, for the tip.

email of the week: should blue lines have blue buses?

From a longtime Canberra-based reader:

In your latest post on [San Francisco] bus wrap art, you refer to your fondness for colour-coding of buses, etc for different service.  For instance in Canberra, this would see the Red Rapid using red coloured buses, the Blue Rapid using Blue coloured buses, and so on.

[JW:  The Red Rapid and Blue Rapid are the two frequent rapid corridors that connect the major dense nodes of Canberra to each other, with widely-spaced stops.  They are the top priority for bus lanes and other speed/reliability improvements.]

 

Which I personally think is great in promotion of the service, making the service stand out - it also helps give a rapid bus (which isn't run solely on transitways) an identity akin to a light rail line.

 

However, I've always found that schedulers don't like it as it limits the general number of vehicles available to run a network. It also removes the ability to use a vehicle in one service type and have it continue its run on a rapid route - thereby removing a connection for some passengers  ...  And I'm sure there's a whole stack of other reasons which schedulers and operators will through up in relation to this.

 

So, I guess the question is, given that this is more of an aesthetic improvement ... do the benefits measure up to the costs?

Seoul, South Korea went a long way with this idea, branding all their buses with four colors that indicate different functions in the network (Trunk, Branch, Rapid, or Circulator).  Paint schemes are often used to distinguished closed Bus Rapid Transit [BRT] systems (systems where buses do not flow through onto other corridors, but remain confined within the BRT infrastructure.)

  
Los Angeles Metro has painted their fleet two colors, red for Rapid and orange for Local.  Even with two colors, the "Local" is problematic.  Orange really means "everything but Rapid," including limited-stop and freeway-express services that wouldn't satisfy anyone's definition of a "local."

And even so, sometimes you see an orange bus on a Rapid line, or vice versa.  I've never seen a painted color scheme where this never occurred; sometimes the dispatcher needs a red bus and all he has are orange ones.  Sometimes an orange bus breaks down and the nearest available spare is red.  You'd rather we didn't send out a bus at all? 

I do think, however, we could be doing much more with signage to highlight color-based brands. 

online "map movies": useful?

Can animation help people understand their transit options?  The Rotherham Metro Borough Council in the UK has done some simple "map movies" that highlight the paths followed by buses and trains.  Here's a still:

Watch the actual animation here.

As they stand, they're limited in usefulness, as the icons move along the routes with no indication of frequency.  They certainly do advertise complexity, which is accurate; this looks like a very complicated network.

But it's easy to imagine taking this to the next step, showing by animation the scheduled paths of all the services in a transit system.  This would be especially helpful in helping citizens understand pulse systems, where the integrated scheduling pattern is an essential part of how the network gets you where your going.  Now that I think of it, I'm pretty sure this has been done, but I've never seen it on a public information website, which is the obvious next step.

basics: some tools for small cities

Early in my career, I did a number of network designs for free-standing small cities in the American West.  These cities, say populations of 30,000-100,000, tend to have a similar set of problems and opportunities, and could probably benefit from a little more theoretical focus.  The same issues arise in most of these cities across North America, Australia, and New Zealand, including:

• Low traffic congestion, which makes it possible to offer a reliable operation built around pulses.
• A tendency for destinations important to public transit to be scattered all over the city, often in response to low land value, thus creating an "everywhere-to-everywhere" demand pattern.
• A predominantly "social service" justification for the network, as opposed to a vehicle-trip-reduction justification, though the latter can arise in cities heavily influenced by universities.

You can see almost all of the issues, and the approach I usually recommend, in Great Falls, Montana.  I led a study that refined the current network in a study for Great Falls Transit in the late 1990s.  Recently, local commenter Kathy called my attention to their network map, and it was interesting to discover that it's hardly changed since I worked on it.  (As always, click graphics to enlarge.)

It's a network of routes mostly running every 30 or 60 minutes.  The central idea of the network is the pulse, a meeting of buses from each route every hour or half hour at a central point, so that you can connect from any bus to any other even though the frequency is poor.  Geometrically, there is no other solution to the problem of connections in low frequency everywhere-to-everywhere networks.  It's routine in small cities across North America.

In Great Falls, the pulse occurs at a downtown transit center which is also, very usefully, the station for intercity buses.  However, the design also provides for an outer pulse point at the far east end.  Most pulse networks create these opportunities, but not all take advantage of them. 

In Great Falls, the ideal would be that Routes 1, 2, 3 and 4, which all cross near the east edge of the city, should make a timed connection there as well.  After all, if the buses are all at the downtown end at the same time, they will tend to be at their outer end at the same time, too, so you should also be able to do a pulse there as well.  If Routes 1, 2, 3, and 4 all had exactly the same running time, this would work perfectly.

It doesn't quite work in Great Falls, because the lengths of the route are too unequal.  We tried to make it work, but ultimately, Route 1 was just too much longer for the others, so to get all the buses to downtown at the same time, Route 1 has to leave the east end before the others arrive.  Note that their map has a warning, near the east end of Route 1, that you cannot make a timed connection there.  Connections among 2, 3, and 4 are possible. 

Another trick I often use is the through-routing at the ends of lines, signified by the little boxes that say things like "5 becomes 6, 6 becomes 5."  This is both a network design strategy and a legibility strategy. 

Operationally, Route 5 and 6 buses aren't going back and forth on individual routes.  Instead, they are operating continuous two-way loops: the bus that goes out of downtown as 5 comes back as 6, then back out as 5, then back in as 6, etc.  Another bus is doing the opposite.

So why do we number the routes as we do?  Why don't we describe them as they are: a clockwise loop and a counter-clockwise loop?  Because on balance, that would be more complexity.  If most people are travelling two-way into or out of the city, why tell them that they need Route 5 to go out and Route 6 to go in, and why clutter the map with overlapping loops and piles of one-way arrows?  It's just simpler to present them as two way routes, then provide the note, for the benefit of the relatively few people who may find it useful, that you can ride through from one route onto the other.

Because of the nomenclature system, every single route segment in the Great Falls network is presented to the customer as two-way, with the trivial exception of pairs of adjacent one-way streets.  This is quite an achievement if you compare this network to many networks in similar-sized towns, which often present dizzying tangles of overlapping one-way loops.  Here, for example, is a bit of the network in Wodonga, Victoria, Australia (PDF of full map).  Compared to the Great Falls map above, how welcoming does this network look to you? 

One-way loops mean that the way you get from A to B is different from the way you get from B to A, and may be much longer or shorter.  My insistence on presenting two-way services, as much as possible, is about offering a transit system that's as legible as the street system, so that people find it welcoming not just for the trip they make every day, but for any new trip they may want to try.

I take pride in having designed the underlying structure a several small-city networks in the American west that are still running a decade or more later, including those of Chico, California (PDF, now part of Butte Regional Transit); Corvallis, Oregon (PDF); and Klamath Falls, Oregon.  You'll see some the same techniques at work in those network structures.  If your local small-city transit system needs unscrambling, send them a link to this post, and encourage them to contact me!