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Author Archive | Jarrett

Confessions of a Spatial Navigator

Posted on October 24, 2009 in Frequent Networks, Maps, Navigation

DSCN3945Can 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:

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Berlin: Serene Images for a Hiatus

Posted on October 20, 2009 in Berlin

DSCF1431 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)

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Karlsruhe: A Ride on the “Tram-Trains”

Posted on October 18, 2009 in Connections, Transfers, Rail Transit, Streetcars (Trams)

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.

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Earthquake and Transformation

Posted on October 17, 2009 in San Francisco

588px-Memorialchurch 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

The Urbanophile on Chicago: From Good to Great?

Posted on October 14, 2009 in Chicago

Aaron Renn at The Urbanophile occupies a really important junction in the blogosphere, and I wish he had more company there.  He loves transit but he’s interested in all aspects of urban development and policy, so he tends to place transit issues in the larger context of a city’s politics, especially conversations about civic identity.  He writes mostly on Midwestern US cities, venturing to California only to prophesy its doom.  But he has a good grasp of national and global peers and often draws on them for inspiration.

He’s just completed a series on the transit challenges facing Chicago, but his descriptions of the political challenge are true of many cities.  It’s not about the technical or network planning issues — for those I rely on The Transport Politic — but he does deal with how transit proposals connect, or fail to connect, with fundamental desires of both the business booster and the average citizen.

Check it out.  There’s even some sex.

Arrival by Train: How End-Stations Differ from Through-Stations

Posted on October 8, 2009 in Architecture, Basics

I’ve seen some great rail stations on my just-completed Europe trip, and some problematic ones.  It’s brought me back to an old point about station design that not everyone understands:  Through-stations and end-stations are completely different design and planning problems.  They generate completely different kinds of space and completely different sensations of arrival and departure.  It’s pointless, for example, to compare New York’s dreary Penn Station, a through-station, with magnificent Grand Central, an end-station.  They are apples and radishes.  Consider:

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Paris: Do We Have Enough Logos Yet?

Posted on October 5, 2009 in Branding, Paris, Rail Transit

DSCF3120

A lot has improved about transit in Paris since I was last there in 1991, and certainly since I lived there in 1986.  But I’m having trouble finding any positive angle on the partial re-branding of the crucial commuter rail and long-distance metro service, the RER.  Because Paris does everything on such an operatic scale, the new RER brands may offer a useful parable about the perils of agency-centered communications, especially in an era where European public transit operating companies are expected to act like private businesses. Continue Reading →

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