For once I agree with Joel Kotkin. Livable cities lists are getting tiring. Does this 2010 list from Mercer, released a month ago, look familiar?
- Vienna
- Zurich
- Geneva
- Vancouver
- Auckland
- Dusseldorf
- Frankfurt
- Munich
- Bern
- Sydney
Author Archive | Jarrett
Singapore: Mysterious, Providential Buses
[Slightly revised 22 August ’10 to eliminate some innocent mistakes. The overall naive tone of this post was intentional; this was, after all, my first full day in Singapore, so I was seeing as one sees when first trying to figure out a network.]
My first transit adventure in Singapore began in at the remote wetland reserve, Sungei Buloh, in the northwest of the island. It’s adjacent to a curious area called the “Kranji Countryside,” billed as Singapore’s “homegrown agritainment hub.” It’s a small patch of farmlands and vineyards designed to serve all the agrarian tourism needs for the 5 million people living just down the road. Continue Reading →
Authorial Narcissism Alert: The Buzzer Interview
The online communications advisor for TransLink in Vancouver, Jhenifer Pabliano, has asked me to answer a few questions, for her to publish in TransLink’s blog, the Buzzer. I figure I might as well post the responses here.
UPDATE: The completed interview is now here. Continue Reading →
Singapore: A Walk with Paul Barter
One of this blog’s earliest fans was Paul Barter, a transport policy scholar based at the National University of Singapore. Paul’s blog, Reinventing Urban Transport, is always worth a look.
Paul and I met for dinner in Singapore last week, a long rambling evening that ended in an outdoor Islamic (no alcohol) cafe, where we watched the Germany vs. England World Cup game amid a crowd who all seemed to have surprisingly strong feelings for one side of the other. (Perhaps, given colonial history, this boiled down to strong feelings for or against the British.) We started with a walking tour of a Singapore that most tourists won’t see, but that covers a huge percentage of the island: the regular, repetitive, but efficient world of the Housing Development Board, the single government agency that provides housing for a majority of Singaporeans. Continue Reading →
Now, Anyone Can Monitor Reliability
Can you think of a better way to measure service reliability than the ones your transit agencies use? Can you develop ways to analyze the system’s performance that will reveal more precisely where and why things go wrong? Now, any transit geek with a head for statistics can try out these ideas, and share what they discover, for any transit agency that publishes a real-time information feed. Continue Reading →
Singapore: Pedestrian First Impressions
It’s what I deserved, I suppose, for having written so much about how cul-de-sacs (at all scales, not just suburban) make attractive public transit impossible. My hotel here, the Elizabeth, turns out to be at the uphill end of a 700m long cul-de-sac. The entire thing is lined with 20-story buildings, mostly residential, that efficient public transit will never reach.
Yet Another Reason to Hire Literature Students
What do corporate sponsorship of station names and advertising wraps on buses and trams have in common?
A literature student will know the answer: For a transit agency, they are both Faustian bargains. Continue Reading →
can you find north underground?
Following up on this widely-discussed post about styles of navigation, today's New York Times has an informal survey of ordinary people's ability to identify north.
Of 20 New Yorkers interviewed — some beneath Union Square, some in
the sun in the park itself — 13 pointed to north accurately and
instantly, 4 pointed in the wrong direction, 2 pointed to the sky …
(Perhaps, when New Yorkers say "I'm going up to Albany," some people are taking that literally.)
They also gave a simple test that seems to me to capture the difference between spatial navigation and narrative navigation, as I used the terms here.
As an extra challenge, we asked a few people to try a “homing task.”
Mr. Vinci was one of the participants. Using chalk, we marked Mr.
Vinci’s position on the ground, then asked him to close his eyes, take
two steps forward, three steps to the right, spin 180 degrees, and then
return to his original location.All the others who were asked to perform this dance reversed their
steps to return back to their starting point. Scientifically, this is
known as a “route-following” approach; anecdotally, it’s a
less-efficient but fail-safe method.But Mr. Vinci stepped diagonally back into place, using what’s called
a “path-integration strategy.”
The "route-following" approach, I think, corresponds to narrative navigation: understanding location through the steps required to get there. Narrative navigators have followed a story to get from A to B, so to get back they can only follow the same story backwards.
Only a spatial navigator would be able to step back diagonally to the starting point. Whereas a narrative navigator can remember a series of steps, and reverse them, the spatial navigator is remembering an actual map, so he can "see" that there is a shorter path back than the one he had taken.
What does this have to do with transit? I think transit agencies need to be conscious of these different styles of navigation when they design information and directions. Only a spatial navigator can tell you if a map works well. Only a narrative navigator can tell you if directions do.
Quote of the Week: Railways vs Democracy
From Vilas Bajaj’s New York Times profile of India’s over-capacity and low-speed railway network. (The system moves 7 billion passenger trips per year, or roughly 7 times the population of the country.)
Critics say the growth and modernization of Indian Railways has been hampered by government leaders more interested in winning elections and appeasing select constituents, rather than investing in the country’s long-term needs. It is one of the many ways that the political realities of India’s clamorous democracy stand in contrast to the forced march that China’s authoritarian system can dictate for economic development.
Has any democracy found an effective way around this? Journalists here in Australia love to reduce all transport infrastructure questions to political calculations around marginal seats in Parliament — and sometimes they’re right. The best solution we encountered in the Sydney Morning Herald Inquiry was to create a professionalized agency with a bit of autonomy from the Minister of Transport — responsive to government for large-scale goals but not detailed decisions of implementation, phasing, and operations. If you don’t like these things, you call them bureaucracies. But so far, they seem to be the least-bad solution I’ve seen.
Is Speed Obsolete? … The wrap-up, for now
Almost two months ago now, I did a post focused on startling claims, by Professor Patrick Condon of the University of British Columbia, that we should focus more of our transit investment on relatively slow services — for which his model is the Portland Streetcar — rather than faster ones, such as Vancouver’s SkyTrain driverless rapid transit system. The resulting post is just the overture. Discussion continued in the long, rich comment string. There’ve also been some follow-up posts, and I’ve featured his response. Continue Reading →