If you know San Francisco at all, take a look at Steve Boland’s new map of its high-frequency “main lines.” It’s quite deservedly copyrighted, so I’ve shown just a taste of it here.
Archive | June, 2009
Unhelpful Word Watch: Convenient
A Transport Politic post on US high-speed rail today contains this quotation from Amtrak CEO Joseph Boardman:
With high-speed rail, speed is not the issue. Convenience and trip times are.
Meanwhile, in Tehran
Today seems to be the climax of the conflict in Iran, and I’m up far too late following the news. What’s it about? The truth. Huge numbers of citizens are risking their lives to create a more truthful society, one needing fewer lies. If we think about what we advocate as environmentalists or urbanists or transit advocates, it’s ultimately just that, I hope. We’re looking for clarity, truth. We’re trying to see through the murk (some natural, some man-made) and give others the courage to do the same.
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.
Slippery Word Watch: Express
Metro is working hard to develop “priority bus corridors,” with express buses that run more often, more quickly, and more reliably than existing service
Like a lot of transit planners, I use the word express in a more precise sense, as one of three kinds of stopping pattern that seem to encompass most successful transit services:
When Expansion is Dilution
My post on crowdsourcing bus stop design included a pitch for the importance of branding in making a particular quality of service visible. I cited the obvious example of the Los Angeles Metro Rapid, the region’s network of frequent and relatively fast buses. Integral to the Rapid product was a distinctive logo, colour scheme, and on the first lines at least, shelter design.
The Revolution on Transit
Amid the mounting civil unrest in Iran’s capital, when everyone fears that mass violence may be imminent, let’s pause to notice that the Tehran Metro is still running.
Andrew Sullivan‘s wall-to-wall coverage includes this cellphone-video record of a ride on the Metro on this exuberant and anxious day.
Comment of the Week: Connection or Intersection?
In an early but still timely post, I argued that we should abolish the depressing American verb to transfer, and replace it with to connect.
Crowdsourcing Bus Stop Design
Bus stops can be pretty basic, or pretty elaborate. Aaron Antrim points me to a Utah-based project, Next Stop Design, that collects ideas for bus stop design from the public, then allows users to rate them. Such a project on a large enough scale could start to generate some “wisdom of crowds” about what kinds of bus stops people like. (This currently leading design, a “covered-wagon” theme for Utah, is by “hopkimp,” details here.) Continue Reading →
Did Sim City Make Us Stupid?
Ah, SimCity. … As a youngster I spent many hours building fields of residential tract housing, industrial parks, huge blighted and substantially vacant commercial districts, mega-highways connecting them all, and Godzilla.
When I recently discovered that the original SimCity was released as open source, I had to download it and try it out. I knew that it was inaccurate, but it was nostalgia. Then I discovered exactly how inaccurate it was. “No mixed residential and commercial areas?!? WTF!” I did play it long enough to also notice that transportation was pretty much a capital expenditure with no operating costs. Sigh.
Yes, those are the two of the worst fallacies built into the original Sim City: