Human Transit

bus signage: a literary view

A great exterior sign on a transit vehicle conveys empowering information with just a few words.  In the last post, I suggested we could learn a lot from the way San Francisco does it. 

Among the many excellent comments, Matt Johnson shared an example of a Prince George's County (Maryland) sign that's typical of what many other transit agencies do.  To me, it overflows the bounds of wayfinding and can only really be appreciated as poetry, so on a rainy Saturday morning, I'm going to let myself riff on it a bit.  The text:

17 MOUNT
RAINIER/IKEA
(NORTHBOUND)
HAVE A
NICE DAY
DRIVE SAFELY
(repeats)

That's six pages of one-line text.  Matt says each line displays for 10 seconds.  That would mean it takes a minute to see the whole sign, which must be an exaggeration.  Matt probably means "each line displays for what feels like forever," and usually 2-3 seconds are enough to create that effect. 

Obviously this is a limited sign, apparently not able to hold more than 12 characters, but as we all know, formal constraints like length limits are often liberating.  Much of the joy of art lies in watching creativity press against some kind of limitation.  If you didn't learn this from reading sonnets or writing haiku, you've probably learned it from Twitter.

In the literature world, it's common to see great poetry published with some kind of annotation that helps pry the piece open for the reader.  So just for fun, I thought I'd do one on this.  As literary critics like to say, there's a lot here.

17 MOUNT

The poem begins with a burst of masculine energy, ambitious, thrusting upward, perhaps with a tinge of hope?

RAINIER/IKEA

In one line, the poem explodes into many dimensions of significance.  Indeed, we could say that this is the line where the sign reveals itself as a poem.

First of all, the artificial separation of "Mount Rainier" into two lines, technically called enjambment, recalls some of the great suspenseful line-breaks of modernist poetry.  William Carlos Williams, say:

So much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

In "RAINIER/IKEA" the slash (/) could be a meta-poetic reference.  When we quote poems in the middle of a paragraph, we use the slash to indicate the line breaks ("So much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow ...")  So the slash used mid-line in poetry signals a winking inversion of that convention.  As in many arts, postmodern consumers know they're looking at an artifice, so the artwork gains credibility by saying "I know I'm just a poem," or whatever.  The mid-line slash could be a clever way of doing that.

Has any punctuation mark become as meaningless as the slash?  In signage it can mean 'or' (as when it separates two alternative destinations served by branches), or it can separate two descriptions of the same thing, or it can mean "between" as in "from one of these to the other."  Here, the poem doesn't let on what it means.   Only patient contextual research has established that the relevant meaning here is "between."  This bus runs from Mount Rainier to Ikea, or from Ikea to Mount Rainier.

Still, the ambivalence invites us to imagine other possible relationships between Rainier and Ikea. For example, we can notice the strangeness of conjoining a permanent-sounding placename with the name of a business.  What would happen to this sign, and this route, if the Ikea moved or merged?  Mountains don't move, we note, which is why we name neighborhoods after them. 

As if that all weren't enough, "RAINIER" in all caps can't signal that it's a proper name, as "Rainier" would do.  Is the bus promising to take us somewhere where it rains more than it does here?

(NORTHBOUND)

Parentheses are unusual on electric bus signs, and they're not too common in poetry either.  Literally, parentheses mean "this might be interesting but don't let it distract you."  So to use a parenthesis on an entire line of text, which forces itself on your attention for a few seconds, contradicts the basic meaning of a parenthesis.  As always, that's how we know to look beyond the basic meaning, to look at the sign as a poem.

Yet the visual look of parentheses also suggests a kind of protective enclosure, like two hands cupping a fragile little idea.  Is this bus insecure about being northbound?  Is it afraid that "northbound" is not what everyone wants to hear? 

Compass directions are tricky, of course, because not everyone knows them.  I'm told that on the North American prairies, where all roads are north-south or east-west, some people develop such a compass-based sense of space that they'll refer to the southeast burner on their stove.  This bus isn't in such a place, though; suburban Maryland has lots of diagonal and curving roads at various angles, so perhaps the parentheses are apologetic in the sense of "we're actually going north, but if you can't think about that, it's ok.  We're not trying to seem that we're smarter than you.  Like Mister Rogers, we like you just the way you are."

All this nuance and richness would have been lost if the sign had tried to tell people what the bus does.  In that case, it would say either MOUNT RAINIER or IKEA, but not both, depending on which way it's going.  That would be Zen in its transparency, but this poet has already signaled that Zen is not his genre. 

HAVE A

A what?  Again, the line break creates suspense.  Am I going to like this?  Should I be hopeful or scared?

NICE DAY

Comforting, unpretentious closure to the suspense.  Yet even here, we can wonder.  "NICE DAY" displays all by itself for a few seconds, so if you see the sign then, it seems to say "It's a nice day!"  If the bus says "NICE DAY" as it comes at you through a blizzard, you might get a deeply spiritual message: "Whatever's happening, this is a nice day, because it's the present and that's the only thing we have."  (The saccharine level in this sentiment is easily turned up or down to suit your taste; that's the liberating quality of the simple "NICE DAY.")   

DRIVE SAFELY

Here we thought the sign was just for us transit customers!  In fact, it's talking to motorists!  Poems often take dramatic turns by suddenly enlarging or shifting the audience.  It's as though we thought we were in an intimate space walled with warm curtains, listening to a poetry reading, when suddenly the curtains drop and we're in the middle of a stadium.  T. S. Eliot was a master at keeping us wondering where we are and who's watching, and playing with our desire to be sure about that.  Who is the audience, really?  How big and diverse is it?  For that matter, is anyone paying attention?  Great postmodern questions, all, and in the poem's climactic moment, we finally confront them.

The sentiment is finely tuned.  Like "HAVE A / NICE DAY," "DRIVE SAFELY" is strategically commonplace, as though the bus company is trying to assure us that it shares our values.  Still, "DRIVE SAFELY" refers to the possibility of danger.  You can read it as plaintive ("Please don't run into us or our customers!") or as confident, maybe even with the necessary toughness of the policeman ("We've looked danger and tragedy in the eye, and we're trying to protect you from it, so don't mess with us.") 

This, of course, is the basic ambivalence of every bus's stance in the modern city, especially the noisy diesel bus.  As a bus operator, you know that your mass, noise, and vibration aren't entirely welcome on most streets, yet you're trying to perform an essential service.  Firefighters are in that situation too, but you can't command the deference that fire trucks do, because it's your job to be routine and predictable even though that almost implies being unappreciated.  How can you get some appreciation?  Say what people on the street want to hear.  "HAVE A / NICE DAY / DRIVE SAFELY."  Who can argue with that? 

And who cares if, while that message is playing, nobody can tell which bus this is?  That's how you know this is poetry.

on casual carpools, or "slugging"

Emily Badger has a useful article on casual carpools, though it would be a little more useful if she -- or her editors at Miller McCune -- didn't keep implying that public transit is somehow the enemy.

Casual carpooling -- or "slugging" as some of its partisans like to call it -- is a perfectly rational response to very congested freeways with High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes.  At informal queues, usually located near an onramp, motorists who want to use the HOV lanes meet up with other commuters who want to ride the lanes as passengers.  These passengers fill the empty seats in the motorist's car so that they can all travel in the HOV lane.  The phenomenon appears to happen where and when an HOV lane offers quite dramatic travel time savings, as it does on certain Washington DC freeways and on the San Francisco Bay Bridge.  It happens only in intensive commute periods, because that's when the HOV lane's advantage is substantial.

For many, it's fun to think of casual carpooling as some sort of revolt against conventional transit.  The term slugging, Badger explains, arose as an insult uttered by "bitter bus drivers" who saw their waiting passengers disappearing into private cars.  Miller McCune's headline describes slugging as "the people's transit," as though conventional transit is something else.

In fact, casual carpooling or "slugging" is largely compatible with conventional transit.  Really, the two are mutually beneficial.  The casual carpool markets in San Francisco and Washington are both parallel to rapid transit lines, but the trains are still full.  As for competition with peak bus services, the long one-way commuter bus run is one of the most expensive services a transit agency can operate.  Often, each bus can be used for only one run during each peak, so all the costs of owning and maintaining the bus must be justified by a single trip.  Drivers for these peak buses are also expensive, because there are costs associated with the short shifts that peak-only service requires, and because drivers must usually be paid to get back to where the shift began before clocking out.     

Long commuter bus runs can still make sense, but they are very expensive compared to conventional two-way, all-day transit.  If casual carpooling reduces the demand for them, the effect on transit is to flatten the overall peak that transit has to serve, increasing its potential cost-effectiveness and improving the utilization of fleet.  It's especially helpful on the AM peak, which is usually the sharper of the two.

So slug away, if you need to feel that you're attacking something.  I prefer to call it a casual carpool, because that term describes what it really is.  And I see no reason not to welcome them.  In fact, when new HOV lanes are developed, the casual carpool phenomenon should be planned for, both by ensuring that there are safe and logical pickup points and also by counting casual carpool trips in the mobility benefits of the lane.

Of course, such planning would contradict the libertarian fantasy -- heavily stressed in the Miller McCune piece -- that casual carpooling is a "government-free" form of spontaneous social organization, a kind of Tahrir Square for the cul-de-sac set.  In fact, "slugging" is a freely chosen response to the design of the government-funded transport infrastructure -- just like everybody else's commute.   

washington dc: agency seeks comment on frequent network map

Washington DC's transit agency WMATA is preparing to publish a frequent network map, and wants your comments.  To start, they're taking the approach of showing frequency as a highlight on the main network map, as this makes it easier to show how multiple overlaid routes combine to form a frequent line. 

For over a decade now as a consultant I've been emphasising the need for transit maps to provide clear visual signals about frequency.  I laid out the case on the blog here.

I have one comment:  WMATA is defining "frequent" as every 15 minutes all day, but on the draft map their legend refers to "buses/hour," which is implicitly an average rather than worst case frequency.  Nobody cares about average freqeuncy!  Frequency maps are about a guaranteed worst case, so they should show only corridors where the longest scheduled gap between trips is 15 minutes.  Four buses an hour may not guarantee 15 minute service if they're not scheduled with exactly even spacing.  In fact, you can meet a standard of "four buses an hour" with four buses that all arrive in a bunch at the top of the hour, but in reality, that's a 60 minute frequency, not 15!

should fares be higher during peak hours?

Metro in Washington DC is considering fare surcharges for using the busiest downtown stations during the peak commute period.  This is proposed as an alternative to a generalized 50-cent surcharge during the busiest part of the peak.  The transit advocates at Greater Greater Washington are on board.  The Transport Politic's Yonah Freemark objects:

But more fundamentally, one should ask whether it makes sense for a transit system to charge extra for exactly the service it is supposed to provide best: journeys to and from the downtown core at peak hours. Should the District of Columbia push for years to increase the number of office jobs downtown if it decides to reverse the game later on and disincentivize the use of the region’s primary transit service to get there? Why penalize the people who are using the system in exactly the way that the system was designed to work?

There's a pretty clear businessman's answer to that rhetorical question, but it's not something that most people want to hear:  Transit ridership is determined by choices people make from among their available options.  If transit is already much more attractive than the other available options (as is usually the case for commutes into a major CBD where motorists would face huge congestion and parking costs) the cruel facts of supply and demand argue that the fare for transit service in those situations can probably rise without much loss of ridership. 

Of course, since we're talking about a government product, you won't win the argument using such cold calculus.  Your argument has to be about fairness.  Here, the case for peak surcharges is that they help people notice, and take account of, the very high cost of providing additional transit capacity during the peak period. 

Service added to a network to handle peak-only overloading is very expensive service to operate. For example, drivers usually must be paid four-hour minimums for shifts that are actually as little as two hours, and the peak determines the number of vehicles that must be owned and maintained.  Peak demand that flows in only one direction, as in the classic American single-centred city, also generates the huge inefficiency of moving all those vehicles, entirely or mostly empty, back in the reverse-peak direction.  Sometimes, peak ridership is so much higher than midday that the fare revenue makes up for all these inefficiencies, but not often.  In fact, my experience with American bus operators is that few of them have really counted the cost of their peak-only services.

To insist that peak service be priced equally to midday or weekend service is to argue that the riders of those off-peak services should subsidize the peak.

There's also an argument for peak surcharging that connects with urbanist goals for transit.  People who have the option of travelling off-peak should be encouraged to do so, because  off-peak capacity is usually abundant, while peak capacity is naturally scarce and costly for the transit agency.  This strategy helps build off-peak patronage, which supports more all-day service, which leads directly to transit that is more relevant to the entire life of the city rather than just the commute.  All-day frequent service is the only type of service that can support transit-oriented development and thus change the shape of the city in more sustainable ways.  From an urbanist perspective, then, a gentle but persistent effort to shift demand away from the peak makes sense.

I have trouble even seeing a social justice argument against peak surcharges, as the average peak-period traveller usually has a higher income than an average midday traveller (because lower-paying jobs, mostly in service industries, are less likely to start and end on the usual peak). So insisting on flat fares all day could actually be seen as regressive.

In cases where (a) peak-only service adds hugely to system costs but (b) doesn't generate the farebox return to cover that impact, I can see only one credible reason not to surcharge the peak (or discount the midday, which is the same thing.)  But it's a good reason:  surcharges/discounts are an added layer of complexity in the fare system, and complexity in fares is a serious barrier to patronage, and especially to the informal, spontaneous use that lets people experience transit as essential community infrastructure. That’s the reason I usually use, but it only takes you so far in a network that’s groaning under peak pressure and desperately needs to encourage people to travel off-peak if they have the option.

My only comment about the specific Washington debate is that any surcharge should really be tied to the direction of demand where capacity is costly, namely into the city in the morning and out in the afternoon.  A generalised surcharge on all peak travel will hit some people who make circumferential or reverse-peak trips where capacity is abundant and the incremental cost of peak service is zero.  Thus, if the surcharge is tied to certain CBD stations, it should ideally apply only to station exits in the morning and entries in the afternoon.   Again, though, the cost in system complexity -- "how long does it take to explain this?" -- has to be counted, and that often counts for quite a bit.

This posted is expanded from my comment on the Transport Politic post on this subject.  See also the comment thread there.

UPDATE:  In response to questions in the comments, let me clarify that I am talking only about situations -- likely to arise only in major cities -- where the differential cost of peak service is substantially higher than the differential in ridership, such that midday riders are effectively cross-subsidising peak riders.  Any proposal for peak surcharges should rest on a thorough accounting of all the costs of peak-only service, including (a) minimum pay hours that exceed work hours, (b) deadhead time [time running empty to/from the garage or to return from a one-way peak run], and (c) all procurement, maintenance and storage costs for fleet used only during the peak. 

tyson's corner: the "last mile" problem

Tyson's Corner, Virginia west of Washington DC is one of America's classic "Edge City" commercial centers.  It looks like the result of a global design competition based on the question:  "How can we build an urban center of shopping and employment that will attract 100,000 people per day, concentrated in a 5 square mile area, while ensuring that almost all of them come by car?" 

You know the look.  Lots of big office buildings with big parking structures, served by car-oriented arterial streets that are neither safe nor pleasant to walk on, all focused around a freeway interchange.

Rapid transit is finally coming in 2013 via the WMATA Silver Line.  The Silver Line will have four stations in Tyson's Corner, but still many destinations there will be too far to walk.  So Tyson's will be an excellent case study of rapid transit's "last mile problem."  When retrofitting rapid transit into a car-oriented suburban area, access from the station to the activity destination is often the problem that drives potential riders away.

Fortunately, sharp minds at Greater Greater Washington are on the case.  They've done a series of posts looking at the Tyson's problem, including:

• An introduction to the problem.
• A busway solution, in which shuttle buses linking the major buildings would run in exclusive lanes.
• An overview of "Personal Rapid Transit" as it might apply to Tyson's.
• A review of limitations of the "PRT" solution. 

If you haven't encountered "PRT," their last posts, and the abundant links in the posts and comments, will give you everything you need to form your own view.

as washington shivers ...

Anyone interested the transit effects of weather will appreciate this press release from WMATA in Washington DC, announcing the suspension of all above-ground transit services in the current snowstorm.

Metrorail trains will stop serving above-ground stations at 1 p.m. today, Saturday, December 19, due to heavy snowfall that is covering the electrified third rail, which is situated eight inches above the ground. The third rail must be clear of snow and ice because it is the source of electricity that powers the trains. Metro officials believe that by 1 p.m. the exposed third rail will be covered by snow. All Metrobus and MetroAccess service also will stop at 1 p.m. because roadways are quickly becoming impassable.

(The release also includes this "snow map" of the rail network.  Faded-out segments are above-ground and therefore not operating.)

Those of us who work around government are often used to a certain guardedness and shadings of meaning in public announcements of agencies and politicians.  To us, such a simple and direct statement of the facts can feel like a blinding insight, much like the effect of sunlight reflected on snow.

integrating transit and land use: a cautionary tale

The Transport Politic tells the story of a new rapid transit corridor study in suburban Maryland, extending west from DC Metro's Red Line terminus at Shady Grove.  Don't worry if you don't know the geography.  Think of this, instead, as a Rohrshach test.  There's a yellow option and a blue option, and the squiggly blue option has an additional optional squiggle in green.  Which one would you rather ride?

For a line that has to wind through a classic suburban landscape of business parks and subdivisions laced with huge freeways, the yellow line is remarkably straight.  Unfortunately, many of the densest destinations with the best ridership potential are on the blue line. 

As a result, Maryland now has to choose between a direct yellow line that misses key destinations and a blue line that serves them but is maddeningly circuitous, especially compared to the freeway that this line would compete with.

There is no clearer example of this basic principle:  Public transit's usefulness is determined by land use planning more than by transit planning.  Once you've arranged your major land use nodes to form a squiggle, you've pretty much prohibited efficient public transit. 

(Given the way it's been built, the best solution I can see here is some form of Bus Rapid Transit with multiple branching patterns, so that a main line could follow the yellow route with branches to serve the major dots on the blue squiggle as well as the green squiggle to Kentlands.  It's not ideal, but no solution here will be as satisfactory or efficient as what you'd have if the big destinations on the blue squiggle were in a straight line.)

This is a textbook example of why rational long-range planning must think about land use and transport together, using a co-ordinating tool such as the Frequent Network strategy that I discuss here as it applies to another sprawling capital region, Canberra, Australia.  It's also a textbook example of the first rule of transit-oriented development, which is:  Be on the Way!  If you want your development to have good transit, put it on a direct route between other places that either have good transit or will readily justify it.  Such a principle, had it been in the backs of everyone's mind as this suburbia was being built, would have made high-quality transit possible without changing the overall density, or for that matter changing anything else that would matter much to people who live there now.

Map by the excellent graphics team at The Transport Politic

mundane things that really matter: defining "on time"

A great piece by Michael Perkins in Greater Greater Washington highlights a perennial problem with on-time performance measures for urban buses.  He cites the policy of the Washington area transit agency, WMATA, which says that a bus is considered on-time if it's no more than two minutes early and no more than seven minutes late.  Perkins explains, with diagrams, that under this policy you could wait 19 minutes for a bus that supposedly ran every ten minutes, and yet the bus (and the one 19 minutes in front of it) would both be considered on-time.

(By the way, the WMATA standard sounds lax to me, though I haven't done a survey.   Few agencies I've worked with accept anything more than five minutes late, or one minute early.)