Here's a new Frequent Network Map for Melbourne, by Campbell Wright, showing where you can get around easily all day if you aren't willing to wait long for public transport. Download and explore it here: PNG. The image below is obviously illegible but the zoomed-out look shows us important things.
What I notice:
1. The inner north of Melbourne, immediate north of the CBD, should be a public transport paradise. It's historic, very dense and has a grid street pattern for easy walking to transit. It has frequent north-south trams on all the major streets, but it lacks the frequent crosstown services that would make a complete east-west grid for everywhere-to-everywhere travel. The routes are there, as you can see here and here , but except for the one Mr Wright draws, none are frequent enough to make adequate connections, so their role is largely symbolic. This is probably because there are too many overlapping infrequent routes, and they need to be considated into fewer stronger routes.
2. The inner east and inner north grids are poorly stitched together. There are frequent crosstown routes in both but it's hard to get from one grid to the other, except by coming almost downtown, to Hoddle Street, or going way out, to Bulleen where the blue 903 crosses.
3. Melbourne has lavished great attention for years on the four orbital Smarbuses, inverted U-shaped routes that are obvious as north-south bands across the far right of the map. What Melbourne really needed was a high-frequency grid, with crosstown (perpendicular to radial) lines concentrated in areas of high demand so that you could go from everywhere to everywhere with a simple L-shaped trip. The Smartbuses oversimplified the grid concept by insisting, for no reason I can discern and at great cost, that these services all had to be complete U shapes wrapped all the way around the city. regardless of the markets through which they pass.
You can see the effect. Parts of Melbourne that could support high frequency crosstown service, like the inner north, or the Port Melbourne-St Kilda corridor, don't have much of it, while a fortune is spent on a vast outermost U (the grey line) which creates no grid effect because it lies far beyond the end of most frequent radials. It's also far, far to long to be operated reliably, as are many of the Smarbuses. The reliability can be assured only by inserting substantial break time along the way for schedule recovery, which would mean that they don't really flow continuously in the way that the route number and brand would suggest.
4. Only with a Frequent Network map like Mr. Wright's can you see Melbourne's network in a way that would help you understand it as an instrument of freedom, something that you might use for many purposes as part of am empowered life. While the State of Victoria has recently taken over public transport information, their published maps still make it very hard to see the network this way. If you arrive at the website wanting to see a real map of your transit system, and you figure out that you need to click Maps / Metropolitan Maps, you're asked to choose between train, tram, and bus. Again, the assumption is that you must be looking for a particular transit technology, and that nobody would ever be interested in simply understanding how all public transport -- with the technologies working together to form a network -- might be useful their lives.
What's more, maps of local buses are chopped up by Local Government Area, arbitrary boundaries that slice up the map in ways that further conceal patterns of usefulness. And of course, there is no Frequent Network map, like you'll find in Brisbane, and like Mr Wright as sketched above, to help you figure out which services are coming soon and which require you to build your life around them.
So if you know how to get around Melbourne freely and easily all day, bookmark Mr Wright's map. For now, it's one of Melbourne's most important bits of public transport info.
Cartographer (and artist) Daniel Huffman is drawing river systems as subway maps. He insists it's just for fun, but these maps push an important button for me.
Leigh Holcombe's email pointing to Huffman's work is fascinating timing, because I was just about to write a section of the book on how branching dissipates frequency.
Really, these fanciful maps are a bit reminiscent of some real transit maps, aren't they?
Metlink's map of the Melbourne train network has important things in common with a river system map. First, both networks are radial, which means that all lines converge to flow to a single point (New Orleans for the Mississippi River, the City Loop for Melbourne's trains). And necessarily, both maps are full of branching:
But branching always divides frequency. The Melbourne map gives a superficial impression that Lilydale, Boronia and Ringwood all have the same kind of transit service. They certainly all have train stations, but the branching means that Ringwood has to have more frequent service than either branch, and that may be the difference between a service that can be used spontaneously and one that requires you to build your life around a timetable.
It's interesting to speculate how transit policy might change if everybody was trained to be suspicious whenever they see this ...
... because this always means one of three things. Either (a) points beyond the branching point have less frequent service or (b) one of the branches operates as a shuttle, requiring a connection, or in a few rare cases (c) the train itself comes apart, with some cars proceeding along one branch and some along the other. Geometrically, it has to mean one of those things. And before you decide whether the service is useful to you, or whether you support a proposed transit project whose map looks like this, you should ask which of those it is.
I've always been partial to mapping styles where a branch is rendered as a wide line splitting into two narrow lines, such that the width of the two narrow lines adds up to the width of the main line. In my presentation "A Field Guide to Transit Quarrels," I used that approach to clarify one of the possible branching patterns of BART's San Francisco Airport line (though this is not the pattern that runs today.)
Because in that respect, transit lines really are like rivers. Just as two converging rivers combine their volume of flow, two converging transit branches combine their frequency.
Peter Parker of Melbourne on Transit recently sketched some frequent network maps for that city, the second largest in Australia. You can find a range of efforts for various cities using the Frequent Network category. My original post arguing for the value of frequent network maps is here.
Although Melbourne is mostly flat and its street network is mostly gridded, it's striking how few crosstown or "orbital" services they are. Over the past few years the main government initiative in this area has been the SmartBus program, a set of new frequent orbital routes. Yet compared to comparably dense parts of Los Angeles, say, the grid is thin.
Downtown is right off the southern edge of this map, so much of this map's area is pre-1945 dense inner city, a mixture of apartments, terraces, and small-lot single-family. The north-south green lines are the famous tram network, while the blue lines are the electrified commuter rail -- usually but not always at 15 minute frequencies or better. In general, though, many destinations in this inner northern area have intense north-south service but little or no opportunity to circulate east-west.
Melbourne is coming late to grid network planning in part because of its own planning history, but also becuase it is such an exceptionally centralized city. Its huge commuter rail network is totally radial, and its extensive tram network also has only a few non-radial elements, all in the inner east and south. The regional information provider, Metlink, does not attempt a frequent network map, so I'm glad that Peter did. It helps me form an understanding of the underlying structure of how bus, rail, and tram work together on a citywide scale.
As an aside, Peter shares a bit of his struggles with the available media:
I started with scribbles on taped scraps of paper. Plain shower curtains from discount shops were then tried. Windows Paint worked but smeared badly with each alteration. Finally Power Point was found workable.
Commenter Evan suggests Visio is the right tool. What do people think?
In any case, it's rare to get this kind of glimpse of an artist's working process! I too have struggled with shower curtains in the pursuit of beauty, but would be too shy to write about it here.
Some colleagues and I have lately had occasion to compare public transit performance in young metro areas of 1-3 million, across North America and Australasia, and we've been turning up draft charts like this one (click to enlarge):
The x-axis is population, the y-axis is public transit trips per capita, per annum. The red triangles are the Australian cities: Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane, Melbourne, and Sydney. The purple circles are US cities: Honolulu, Portland, and Seattle. The blue dots are Wellington and Auckland in New Zealand.
But we're especially struck by the green dots, which represent Canada. The four dots are Ottawa, Edmonton, Calgary and Vancouver, and all are at the top of this heap despite relatively low populations. Even tiny Edmonton and Calgary are outperforming all the other cities studied, including Sydney and Melbourne.
I've been asked to write a few paragraphs about why Canada's cities do so much better than very similar cities in the US or Australia/NZ. I have my own speculations, but anyone with references or insights on this, please comment!
UPDATE: The consultant in charge of this project has reviewed the comments so far (Oct 8 0900 Sydney time) and observes:
Some rapid comments, having skimmed through the blog responses:
The whole topic would be good for a PhD—why has no done it already??
Good question! More on this topic here!
In his 2010 book Transport for Suburbia, Paul Mees notices a fallacy that seems to be shared by sustainable transport advocates and car advocates. Both sides of this great debate agree that effective transit requires high density.
Sustainability advocates want higher urban densities for a range of reasons, but viability of public transit is certainly one of them. Meanwhile, advocates of car-dominance want to argue that existing low densities are a fact of life; since transit needs high density, they say, there’s just no point in investing in transit for those areas, so it’s best to go on planning for the dominance of cars.
Mees calls on his fellow transit advocates to let go of the idea that good transit requires high densities:
The central argument of this book is that density is not destiny. Transport policy itself has a bigger impact on transport patterns than urban planners have realized, and suburbs don’t have to be totally reliant on the car. Planners who insist that car dominance can only be addressed by impossibly large increases in density may actually be entrenching the problem they are trying to solve.
Transit does depend on density, but there are three problems with saying that “transit requires high density.”
Mees is right that “density is not destiny.” Cities of any density can make better or worse transit choices and achieve significantly different outcomes as a result. But density is still an overwhelming force in determining the possibilities and outcomes of transit, and we can’t begin to make good transit decisions until we understand it.
Density is hard to talk about for two reasons: It’s very emotional and it’s hard to define and measure.
The emotions are inevitable: Whenever we talk about urban form, people hear us making judgments about their homes. I can stand in front of a group of citizens and talk about how a certain kind of development pattern implies certain consequences for transit, and thus for sustainability, and thus for civilization. As we talk, it may appear that we’re having a thoughtful and educational discussion about good and bad design. But some people in the audience have chosen to make their homes in the very development pattern that I’m describing, and to those people, I’m saying that their home is good or bad.
Once you hear that, you’re likely to have a strong emotional reaction that makes you deaf to rational argument. On some level, consciously or unconsciously, you’re going to feel as though I’d walked into your own livingroom and told you that your decor is not just ugly but a threat to civilization. We all feel defensive about home.
But emotions often hide inside things that look like facts, and density "facts" are a great example. In transit arguments, people say things like “the net density of Toronto is ###/hectare,” because this sounds like a fact and therefore conveys some authority to their argument. In reality, though, there are several possible meanings of “density” in that sentence, as well as several possible definitions of “net” and ”Toronto.” Briefly:
So the statement “the net density of Toronto is ###/hectare” is really as subjective as the statement “I think that cities should have more open space, narrower streets, and should have single governments covering the entire urban area.” Because each of those opinions can affect how you choose to define “net,” “density,” and “Toronto,” which in turn determines the number that you declare, with cold factual authority, to be the net density of Toronto.
At the core of Mees’s book, for example, is a table[1] that compares the gross residential density of a bunch of urban areas with the transit performance in each area. The point of the table is to show that there’s really no relationship between the two. Before we look at some fun facts from this table, remember that definitions are everything. So in this case:
So with those cautions, here’s a taste of Mees’s scandalous numbers:
| Metro Area | Density (pop/ha) | Transit mode share for work trips. |
| Los Angeles | 27.3 | 4.7 |
| New York | 20.5 | 24.8 |
| Las Vegas | 17.7 | 4.1 |
| Vancouver | 17.0 | 16.5 |
The density figures are calculated to shock. Los Angeles is denser than New York? Yes, that’s what happens when you average over a huge contiguous metro area. Your own impression of “New York” is probably formed by the massed and soaring towers of Manhattan, but New York is a dense city surrounded by a lot of very low-density suburbs that are all included in this concept of “metro New York.” Likewise, your stereotype of Los Angeles may be a ranch-style house with a big pool on a cul-de-sac, which implies a very low density, but in fact much of greater Los Angeles is four-story apartment buildings lined up for mile after mile. Obviously, our impression of the density of a city is based on the part of it we choose to remember, or that we tend to see on television. The average density of the whole urban area may be entirely different.
To me, Mees’s table proves that average density over a whole urban area is the wrong kind of density for understanding transit. The impression you probably have of the densities of these cities is actually closer to the kind of density that matters.
Transit reacts mainly with the density right around its stations. It is in the nature of transit to serve an area very unevenly, providing a concentrated value around its stops and stations and less value elsewhere. So what matters for transit is the density right where the transit is, not the aggregate density of the whole urban area.
Of course, what matters even more precisely is how much stuff is within walking distance of a station, so it's not just density (the amount of stuff in a fixed radius) but the completeness of the pedestrian network. A poorly connected pedestrian network can ensure that much of the stuff that's within a 400m radius is not in a 400m walk.
Consider Las Vegas, which Mees finds to be denser than highrise Vancouver. The Las Vegas economy is based on hospitality and entertainment, labor-intensive industries with low average wages. So the city needs a lot of housing suited for lower incomes. The Las Vegas way is to build utterly car-dependent apartment buildings on a vast scale, achieving all of the disadvantages of density with none of its benefits. Consider:
For scale, the width of this entire image is about 0.55 miles, or 0.9 km. The arterials along the south and west edges of the image are the only streets straight and fast enough for efficient transit. Note how these large apartment developments are soundwalled from most direct access to these arterials, and how the accesses they have tend to come out at points where there's no controlled intersection, so the arterial is dangerous to cross. (Two-way transit trips always require stops on both sides of the street, so if you can't cross the street, you don't really have access.)
So yes, Las Vegas has massive quantities of apartment buildings, which yield a high average density. But at two levels of scale, these are deployed in patterns that make effective transit difficult. On a macro level, Las Vegas is mostly midrise apartments spread over a large area, requiring transit to cover more distance to serve them; this is the most obvious explanation for Las Vegas's low transit performance compared to highrise Vancouver. But the micro explanation is important too. In the details of street pattern and pedestrian circulation, typical Las Vegas urban fabric is designed for motorists and hostile to pedestrians. Average urban density says nothing about either of these factors, even though they are what really determine the transit experience in each city.
It's inevitable that in comparisons between cities, we're going to hear average density figures. These figures are better than nothing when it comes to making global comparisons. The famous databases created by Jeffrey Kenworthy and Peter Newman, for example, are useful in showing how a range of sustainability outcomes vary with density.
But averages are dangerous, especially in transit. Averaging sounds like a credible way to draw a simple fact out of a huge and diverse reality, but often, averages are just not the fact that matters. In a recent post on the perils of average success, I pointed out that no transit customer really cares about average frequency, or average lateness, or average crowding. By the same token, transit advocates need to be suspicious of average density. What matters is the density around the transit system. How can we best measure that?
[1] Fig 4.1 p 60
[2] In the US, “an ‘urbanized area’ is defined for each metropolitan region, made up by combining adjacent ‘census blocks’ (the smallest units for which data are collected) with more than 1000 residents per square mile, or 386 per square kilometre. … Canada defines “urban area” on an almost identical basis to the US, using a density threshold of 400 [residents] per square kilometre.” The data is from 2006 census in Canada, 2000 in the US.
Donald Shoup, author of The High Cost of Free Parking, will be at a full-day seminar at Melbourne Town Hall on November 4. Details here.
The Public Transport Users Association of Australia has a great press release and analysis on the need to re-think the ideal of a "metro," and to question why Australians should wait decades for them.
The major cities of Australia (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane Adelaide, Perth) all have rather similar urban transit networks, dominated by a product that might be called European-scale commuter rail: trains with overhead-catenary power running mostly on a dedicated network. Within the first 40 km or so of radius, these networks usually run at frequencies of 15-30 minutes, but there's a huge surge of additional service during the peak commute period, to handle the flows of commuters into and out of the central city. Further out, many of the lines branch, or introduce diverse stopping patterns, which have the effect of increasing longer-distance speeds but reducing frequencies further, at least at minor stations.
A crucial feature of these networks is that they are (a) almost totally radial, offering few if any substantial opportunities to travel between non-CBD centres, and (b) designed to cover a huge range of urban densities with the same basic product. There's no difference -- in fleet, station facilities, staffing, ticketing, etc -- between a train that you'd ride 3 km to a dense inner-city suburb and one that you'd ride 50 km or more to low-density suburbs on the outermost edges of your city. There is often a difference in frequency -- it's usually lower further out as routes branch or introduce stopping patterns -- but not always. In some cases, such as the Inner West line in Sydney, the denser inner city stations are served by just one stopping pattern at a relatively low frequency, while most trains fly through these stations nonstop aiming for destinations further out.
As commonly happens with commuter rail, the government focus is so much on the peak-period commuter that it often misses out on opportunities to do other good things with its trains and infrastructure. Density is high enough to support high all-day demand in the inner city (roughly comparable to the extent of each city in 1945) and at key regional centres further out. But this demand is everywhere-to-everywhere, not just to the CBD, so it requires (a) good connection opportunities throughout the network, especially between trains and buses and (b) high enough frequencies that these connections are worth the wait. Many of the major inner-city urban rail lines in Australia could easily be run every 5 minutes or better if there were a commitment to fund operations and build connection opportunities.
For a variety of political and cultural reasons, many of these opportunities have not been pursued. Instead, in Sydney and Melbourne especially, we've been encouraged to long for something called a "metro." Many Australians have been to Europe and often to some of the East Asian megacities, and the word "metro" is meant to refer to the high-frequency, high-capacity rail transit, usually underground, that laces the dense cores of those cities.
It's been easy to jump from those desires to the notion that since Australia doesn't have metros now, it needs to build them. But Bowen's work in Melbourne (and our own work on the Sydney Morning Herald inquiry) are pointing out that our cities already have a network of grade-separated rail lines covering the areas of European density, and that the quickest way to get a "metro" level of mobility is simply to run these lines much more frequently.
There are some barriers to this (notably the two-man crews still required on Sydney trains) but most would be easy to address if there were a conceptual shift. The conceptual problem is that as long as our rail bureaucracies understand the peak commute to be their primary product, they will continue to care about running time more than they do about frequency. Running time matters more than frequency only for relatively long trips (because we tolerate longer waits to go longer distances) and for rigidly scheduled trips such as classic commutes (because we select a particular schedule trip to use). Everywhere else -- throughout the inner city all day, for example -- people experience frequency as maximum wait time, and are not willing to wait long to travel short distances. Even a 15-minute frequency is on the outside of tolerable if you're just going 3 km or so. If you just miss one, take a cab or even a bus, and you may reach your destination sooner.
Having said all that, I do like driverless, fully-automated metros, which sever the link between frequency and labor cost and thus make it possible to run every 4 minutes even at midnight. They have done wonders in Vancouver, not just for mobility but for urban form. Sydney had a proposed driverless metro that would have broken ground this year, but the Government cancelled it in February 2010 after three years of confusion and acrimony.
In Sydney's case, the process was too fast. A long driverless metro line from the city to the northwest suburbs was suddenly announced in 2007, using a corridor that had never been identified for rapid transit in any land use plans. When that proved too ambitious, it was hacked back to a tiny metro that barely got out of the CBD, which proved to be too disruptive to the life of the city and yet not long enough to do much good. From the beginning, too, the media treated the metro as a political attack on the existing rail system and its unions. That wasn't entirely untrue, but it was certainly exaggerated, and while inter-agency spite can a powerful political force in planning, most people agreed that it wasn't a very good basis for a multi-billion-dollar infrastructure investment.
Even if Sydney had proceeded with starting a driverless metro system, the vast majority of the city would have continued to depend on the existing rail product, and would have needed to see further investment in all-day frequency to make the existing lines more "metro"-like. So now, in a way, Sydney has a clearer path. We have the tracks, the wires, the stations, and the trains. All we need is a new commitment to all-day service. It's not cheap, but compared to an all-new all-underground automated metro, it's a bargain.
Robert Cervero: The Transit Metropolis: A Global Inquiry
A rigorous but readable study of the transit choices made by a range of cities around the world, and how these choices have shaped the city for better or worse.
Richard Gilbert and Anthony Perl: Transport Revolutions: Moving People and Freight Without Oil
James S. Russell: The Agile City: Building Well-being and Wealth in an Era of Climate Change
David Sucher: City Comforts: How to Build an Urban Village, Revised Edition
Engaging book on the details of creating welcoming urban space.
Allan B. Jacobs: Great Streets
The definitive book on the ingredients of a great urban streetscape.
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