Peter Parker at Melbourne on Transit has an interesting analysis of “scramble crossings” at signals. Scramble crossings are phases of a signal that give pedestrians the green in all directions, so that they can cross in any direction including diagonally across the intersection. Sydney, where I live, has exactly one of them, to my knowledge. It’s right in front of Town Hall. Continue Reading →
Author Archive | Jarrett
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?
San Francisco: Sometimes Cuts Are an Improvement
Most North American transit agencies are cutting service this year, but there’s a huge difference in how they’re doing it. My last post discussed the painful cuts happening at Tri-Met in Portland. Here’s better news out of San Francisco, where service is being trimmed and shaped not just to save money, but to create a simpler, more frequent, and arguably fairer network. The changes are informed by a long study and outreach effort called the Transit Effectiveness Project, which is finally bearing some fruit in this year’s harsh desert of funding. Continue Reading →
Portland: Counting by 17
As hard budget shortfalls sweep across North America, transit agencies are making all kinds of changes to balance the budget. Portland’s Tri-Met tried at first to cut low-ridership services, but as the red ink keeps flowing they’ve finally had to cut something every urbanist should care about. They’re cutting the core Frequent Network, the service that’s designed to meet the needs of people who want to get around the city easily all day, with spontaneity and a sense of personal freedom. Continue Reading →
San Francisco: The Paper Clip Snaps
The Bay Bridge connecting San Francisco with Oakland (and most of the continent) has been closed for several days. SF Chronicle :
The bridge was shut down Tuesday evening. High winds and heavy
traffic loosened a pair of tie-rods and a steel bracket that was
installed Labor Day weekend to take pressure off a fracture discovered
in a structural beam – an eyebar – on the eastern span.
The 5,000-pound assembly crashed onto the upper deck, totaling three cars during the evening commute. Continue Reading →
More Confessions of Spatial Navigators
The last post on spatial vs narrative navigation got quite an interesting comment thread, and interesting response posts by both Angus and Cap’n Transit, all of which I encourage you to read. Commenter Russ also offered several useful scholarly links, especially to Janet Vertesi’s very readable article exploring how the familiar London Tube map structures people’s images of the city. Continue Reading →
Confessions of a Spatial Navigator
Can science explain why some transit system maps are so much better than others? Alex Hutchinson has an excellent article in the Canadian newsmagazine The Walrus on how increased reliance on Global Positioning Systems (GPS) for navigation may be reshaping our brains. Might this be related to the difficulty of getting good maps of a transit system?
Humans have two methods of navigation. Spatial navigators can construct maps in their heads as they experience a place, and also tend to be good at using maps as navigational aids. Narrative navigators navigate by creating or following verbal directions. For spatial navigators, the answer to the question where? is a position in mapped space. For narrative navigators, the answer to where? is a story about how to get there. Obviously, this is a spectrum; many of us are in the middle with partial capabilities in both directions. (I think we probably all know this from our own experience, but according to Hutchinson, the definitive academic study showing this difference has the amazingly recent date of 2003.)
Taxi drivers, obviously, have to be spatial navigators, because they must constantly plot courses for trips they’ve never made before. Before the advent of GPS, this requirement actually shaped their brains. Hutchinson writes:
Berlin: Serene Images for a Hiatus
It’s going to be quiet the rest of this week on Human Transit. I’m in Canberra all week doing full days of meetings to brief various stakeholders about the Strategic Public Transport Network Plan that I have been doing for them over the last two years.
While waiting for new material, these images from Berlin’s Märkisches Museum U-bahn station may serve as a calming visual hold-music. (Click to enlarge and sharpen.) They’re a series of artworks clearly based on maps of Berlin from different times of in its history. German Wikipedia tells me that they’re the work of Jo Doese, Karl-Heinz Schäfer, and Ulrich Jörke, and that they were completed in 1988, under communist rule, the year before the wall came down. I enjoy their Deco-like cool and serenity. (click below to continue)
Karlsruhe: A Ride on the “Tram-Trains”
Sparked in part by a suggestion from a reader, I spent two days last month in Karlsruhe, a pleasant but not touristed small city in the southwest of Germany. In rail transit circles, Karlsruhe is famous for inventing “tram-trains,” a vehicle and service type that can operate in the street as a streetcar/tram, but can also go onto standard railway lines, often shared with intercity passenger rail and freight, to go longer distances into the surrounding suburbs. This means that the service you board in your outer suburb can flow right into the city’s core streetcar network, and get you closer to your inner-city destination than the train station would be; thus saving you from having to make a connection.
Earthquake and Transformation
The San Francisco Loma Prieta earthquake was 20 years ago today. (I believe I’m the only person who spent the entire quake inside Stanford’s Memorial Church, my closest brush with death to date. I wrote about that experience, in a more self-consciously literary voice, here.)
What would the Bay Area look like today if the quake hadn’t occurred? I’m almost sure the Embarcadero and Central Freeways would still be towering over the city, and the cars that they delivered into Chinatown and Hayes Valley would still be there, circling, looking for parking.
Oakland wouldn’t have Mandela Boulevard, formerly Cypress Street, but nor would there be a new freeway looming over West Oakland BART station. We might not have seen the permanent modal shift to BART and AC Transit buses triggered by the temporary closure of the Bay Bridge, or at least not so suddenly.
What else do you think would be different? What would be the same?
Photo of Memorial Church by Michael Connor from http://www.connorphotography.net