Human Transit

happy canadian thanksgiving

This post is sentimental and off-topic, apart from its obvious link to the triumphs of Canadian transit and of Vancouver in particular.  But hey, it's my blog.

Though I lived in Canada for only a year, I hope my fondness for the country comes through in this sentimental meditation on Canadian thanksgiving.  I wrote it five years ago around this time, when I was based in Vancouver, but it all feels true enough today.

Thanksgiving Day in Canada is Monday, October 11.  May it be a day of joy and gratitude for all of HT's Canadian readers, and for anyone who's ever admired their remarkable nation.

 

montréal: more on the new frequent network

Andy Riga of the Montreal Gazette did an interview of me on Frequent Network branding, in response to the rollout of such a brand by their local transit agency, the STM.  The whole interview is here.  News stories based on it are here and here. 

The most useful big-picture idea, in retrospect, is probably this:

Many urban opinion leaders in North America have formed their idea of good transit from travelling in Europe, where many cities have rail networks that feel complete.  In London, Paris, and Berlin, rail seems to be going everyone that most people, and certainly most tourists, want to go.  So these opinion leaders come away with the view that building great transit is about expanding rail. 

That attitude is colliding with the urgency of transit improvement in North America [and Australasia], where most cities have incomplete rail networks if they have them at all.  Faced with the big sustainabiliy challenges that are coming on, these  cities are discovering that they need quality transit sooner, and in more places, than they can possibly deliver with rail network expansions.   

So it no longer makes sense to say that the "good" transit network is the rail network.  We need brands and systems of communication that help people see where their good services are, regardless of whether they're rail or bus or ferry or gondola.  And since we all hate waiting, frequency is the most important variable to market!

montréal: the pleasure of maps made by hand, or by eye

Google is getting us all used to the idea of automatically generated maps, which sacrifice many opportunities for clarity and beauty in order to be instantly available and automatically up-to-date. But Anton Dubrau, who writes the intelligent Montréal transit blog Catbus, asks:

I guess there is this general question whether frequent network maps should be automatically generated, or made by hand. Which is probably related to the question whether they should be abstract and compact, or geographically accurate. Or whether they should be published today, or ... later. It took me more than a solid week to make a map of Montréal's network by hand.

He certainly did, and it's a beauty.  But you'll have to go to his post to see the thing full-size, and to see how it compares to the transit agency's map and a street-map overlay.  It's a great piece of work.

There's no question that the most beautiful network maps will continue to be those made by hand, with great care and thought, by people who know the city.  I'd like to say "most useful" as well, but that will be true only as long as they can be kept up to date. 

Of course, it wasn't that long ago that "by hand" meant with paper and ink, as opposed to on a computer.  Perhaps "by eye" is a better term for this kind of work, which rests on seeing not just the literal geography of the city, which is easy to automate, but also its structure and character, which still appear only to the talented local eye.

montréal's new frequent network brand

Montréal's transit agency STM is the latest to introduce a frequent network brand for its buses.  The Réseau 10 Minutes ("ten-minute network") will consist of 11 all-day services running every 10 minutes or better.  The excellent local urbanist blog Montréalites Urbaines (in French) has been following the story.  Sadly, it is not yet highlighted on the network map, at least not the map for the central city, but these things usually happen in several steps as the idea slowly takes root in different parts of an agency.

[updated]  They are also using a version of the brand to highlight 19 lines that are every 10 minutes in one direction only -- one direction in the morning and the other direction in the afternoon.  These lines will be frequent only if you're making a round trip in a certain direction.  It's a curious exception.  The real value of a Frequent Network brand comes from the ability to assure customers that they can build their lives around it, not just use it for commuting or for travel in a certain direction.  While I advise clients not to make such compromises, it's not surprising as a response to the fact that if you just show your network that runs frequently all day, you get a map of your inner city area only, because that's where you have the density to support such service.  Someday, I hope regional transit agencies will be able to have clear conversations with their constituents about why their service has to be much higher where densities are higher, but for now, many agencies feel unready to take on this battle given their own city's political climate.

[updated] On the bright side, 10-minute frequency is an impressive threshhold.  Even Los Angeles uses 12 minutes as its cutoff, and 15 is more typical.  The duration, 6:00 AM to 9:00 PM, is also impressive.

Still, it's been done in North America, specifically in Los Angeles, Minneapolis-St. Paul (here and click right tab), and Portland.  The idea is going to spread for the best of reasons: because it's such a simple and powerful idea.  Outside North America, I'm aware of Leeds, UK; Curitiba, Brazil, and Adelaide and Brisbane in Australia.  If you know of others, I'd appreciate a comment and link so that I can promote these as well.

if your bus is late, should the agency pay?

An engineering professor in Montréal got his transit agency to pay for his taxi fare because his bus didn't show up.  Unfortunately, it look many days of his time in small-claims litigation, so his trophy, a $40 check from the agency, should probably be framed rather than cashed.

Now and then a transit agency tries some kind of "on time or we pay" guarantee.  In the Montréal suburb of Laval, for example, the buses are equipped with Global Positioning System (GPS) technology, and the deal is that if your bus is more than five minutes late (a fact that the agency can verify via GPS), you can demand a free bus ticket, which is nice but not much of an incentive for the agency.  It seems to me the same GPS-driven approach could be used to implement a policy if "when we're more than x minutes late, we stop collecting fares."  That would actually help a late bus get back on time, because fare transactions are so time consuming.

There are excellent reasons not to do this, of course, or to do something more subtle.  For one thing, lateness has so many causes beyond the agency's control that it could cause substantial unavoidable payouts that would ultimately come at the cost of service. 

For very frequent urban routes, a better GPS-driven scheme would be based on actual headway (time between consecutive trips, i.e. maximum wait time) rather than timetable, for reasons I discussed here.  You could stop collecting fares on any bus that is more than __ minutes behind the one ahead of it.  I'd suggest x be something like 3 times the published headway or ten minutes, whichever is less.

Still, we'd have to remember that the lost revenue, if substantial, would come out of service, sooner or later.

I'm curious if any readers have encountered an effective one.  By effective I mean one that actually helps motivate good system performance, rather than just shifting scarce funds from service into claims.

(From Montréal Gazette via Montréalités Urbaines)